A Simple and Flexible Volume Rendering Framework for Graphics-Hardware-based Raycasting

Abstract

In this work we present a flexible framework for GPU-based volume rendering. The framework is based on a single pass volume raycasting approach and is easily extensible in terms of new shader functionality. We demonstrate the flexibility of our system by means of a number of high-quality standard and non-standard volume rendering techniques. Our implementation shows a promising performance in a number of benchmarks while producing images of higher accuracy than obtained by standard pre-integrated slice-based volume rendering.