Field Approximation Using Piecewise Polynomials for Fast Volume Rendering on GPU

Volume data are stored as different data types depending on the application and the discrete data needed to be interpolated for visualization. In this study, we present a parallel volume rendering algorithm that accelerates the direct rendering of scalar fields obtained as interpolations of unorganized scattered data. The rendering process consists of two phases: (1) the preprocessing phase where the given scalar field is converted to a grid of polynomials for fast field evaluation and efficient parallel computation, and (2) the rendering phase where the direct rendering of the polynomials' grid is performed in parallel on the graphics processing unit GPU. Our performance tests show that the method enables interactive volume rendering of smooth scalar fields.