Hardware-accelerated high-quality filtering on PC hardware

We describe a method for exploiting commodity 3D graphics hardware in order to achieve hardware-accelerated high-quality filtering with arbitrary fil-ter kernels. Our approach is based on reordering the evaluation of the filter convolution sum to ac-commodate the way the hardware works. We ex-ploit multiple rendering passes together with the ca-pability of current graphics hardware to index into several textures at the same time (multi-texturing). The method we present is applicable in one, two, and three dimensions. The cases we have been most interested in up to now are two-dimensional recon-struction of object-aligned slices through volumet-ric data, and three-dimensional reconstruction of ar-bitrarily oriented slices. As a fundamental build-ing block, the basic algorithm can be used in order to directly render an entire volume by blending a stack of slices reconstructed with high quality on top of each other. However, it is important to em-phasize that our approach has no fundamental re-strictions with regard to the filters that can be em-ployed. Thus, it could also be used for more general filtering tasks than reconstruction, e.g., image pro-cessing.