GPU Improvements on the sorting and projection of tetrahedral meshes for direct volume rendering

International audienceDirect Volume Rendering is one of the most popular visualization techniques. Although approaches such as ray-casting or slicing are fast and well-implemented on graphics hardware for regular and irregular grids, cell projection techniques are still time-consuming for large tetrahedral meshes. We propose improvements to the pipeline of cell projection techniques based on the SXMPVO [4] and the Projected Tetrahedra [8] (PT) algorithms. Specifically, we exploit new functionalities of the latest graphics hardware to remove bottlenecks in the sorting and rendering phases