Layered volume splatting

We present a new layered, hardware-accelerated splatting algorithm for volume rendering. Layered volume splatting features the speed benefits of fast axis-aligned pre-classified sheet-buffer splatting while at the same time exhibiting display quality comparable to high-quality post-classified view-aligned sheet-buffer splatting. Additionally, we enhance the quality by using a more accurate approximation of the volume rendering integral. Commonly, the extinction coefficient of the volume rendering integral is approximated by the first two elements of its Taylor series expansion to allow for simple α-blending. In our approach we use the original, exponential extinction coefficient to achieve a better approximation. In this paper we describe the layered splatting algorithm and how it can be implemented on the GPU. We compare the results in terms of performance and quality to prior state-of-the-art volume splatting methods