GPU Accelerated Iso-surface volume rendering Using Depth Based Coherence
We recently has a technical sketch and a 4 minute video accepted at Siggraph Asia. This work recieved an average score of 4 of 5 by our 3 reviewers. Note that this same research won 1st place, industry's choice, 2nd place Faculty's choice, and 2nd place, People's choice, at the Virginia Tech Undergraduate Research in CS Symposium.
Video of our application running is available here.Our sketch is available here.
We also submitted a full paper covering this material to i3D 2010. Our paper is available here.
Here is a brief, high level summary of our research: Volume rendering is the process of a visualizing surfaces in a volume data set. In the medical domain, volume data is typically comprised of multiple "slices" from an MRI or CT scanner. When combined into a 3D volume data set, these scans represent the tissue density sampled onto a regular grid.
Our goal is to visualize surfaces of a specific value (isosurfaces). Different types of tissue, such as skin or bone, have a different density. Our new prediction buffer approach allows us to visualize volume data over 2X faster.
Our system was implemented on the GPU using Nvidia CUDA. We tested our prediction buffer approach against traditional naive volume raycasting. During this process, we did a lot of benchmarking, and found optimal settings for our code based on the CUDA occupancy calculator and empirical testing.
Fluid Simulation For Computer Graphics
For this project I have been working with Dr. Adrian Sandu and have been implementing a level set based fluid simulator using semi-Lagrangian advection.
I have been basing my implementation on the algorithms described in this book: Fluid Simulation For Computer Graphics
A 2D implementation is complete, and I am working on a full 3D simulator using the FLIP particle method.
I have also been implementing a Java applet for SPH (Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics). Below is a video from a very basic 2D SPH implementation that uses a regular grid for neighbor lookups.
An very early draft of the technical report is available here.
Screen Space Ambient Occlusion For Volume Rendering
Coming soon!
Real Time Screen Space Global Illumination
Coming soon!