An interactive system for heterogeneous 3D volumetric data visualization

With the development of 3D scanning and imaging technologies, large amount of 3D surface and volumetric geometric data have been routinely collected these days. Compared with surface data, volumetric data are usually equipped with rich material, texture, intensity, and other heterogeneous structural information in their interior regions. Effectively visualizing such information can be very important since it facilitates many data analysis tasks. This paper studies the effective visualization of heterogeneous volumetric data which can have not only geometry but also other equipped scalar fields. We have developed an interactive system that can efficiently visualize the geometry and scalar field simultaneously via different cross-sections. A simple data structure used for handling large-scale 3D data is presented. Vector fields on the volumetric data such as 3D mapping, B-Spline fitting and fitting error field can also be effectively visualized in our framework. Effectiveness of our system is demonstrated and compared with existing volumetric data rendering system. ©2010 IEEE