Hardware-Accelerated High-Quality Reconstruction on PC Hardware

We describe a method for exploiting commodity 3D graphics hard-ware in order to achieve hardware-accelerated high-quality filtering with arbitrary filter kernels. Our approach is based on reordering the evaluation of the filter convolution sum to accommodate the way the hardware works. We exploit multiple rendering passes to-gether with the capability 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 di-mensions. The cases we are most interested in up to now are two-dimensional reconstruction of object-aligned slices through volu-metric data, and three-dimensional reconstruction of arbitrarily ori-ented slices. As a fundamental building block, the basic algorithm can be used in order to directly render an entire volume by blend-ing a stack of slices reconstructed with high quality on top of each other. We have used bicubic and tricubic B-splines and Catmull-Rom splines, as well as windowed sinc filters, as reconstruction kernels. However, it is important to emphasize that our approach has no fundamental restrictions with regard to the filters that can be used