Accelerated Volume Rendering with Chebyshev Distance Maps

Volume rendering has useful applications with emerging technologies such as virtual and augmented reality. The high frame rate targets of these technologies poses a problem for volume rendering because of its very high computational complexity compared with conventional surface rendering. We developed an efficient empty space skipping algorithm for accelerating volume rendering. A distance map is generated which indicates the Chebyshev distance to the nearest occupied region (with non-transparent voxels) within a volume. The distance map is used to efficiently skip empty regions while volume ray casting. We show improved performance over state-of-the-art empty space skipping techniques.