• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
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• 2006.06a
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• pp.118-120
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• 2006

최신 GPU는 일반 CPU보다 10배 이상 빠른 연산능력을 갖추고 있는데다가 사용자가 직접 프로그래밍 할 수 있기 때문에 이를 이용한 고속 볼륨 렌더링 알고리즘에 대한 연구가 활발하게 진행되고 있다. 그러나 스트림 프로세싱에 특화 돼있는 GPU의 특성상 early ray termination과 empty space skipping을 구현하는 것이 쉽지만은 않다. 특히 지금까지 제안됐던, 프록시 도형(proxy geometry)을 사용하는 볼륨 렌더링 알고리즘은 empty space skipping은 비교적 효율적으로 구현하지만 early ray termination의 지원은 상대적으로 미비했다. 본 논문에서는 스텐실 버퍼와 OpenGL 확장(extension)을 이용한 2-Pass 알고리즘을 통해서 early ray termination과 empty space skipping을 동시에 구현하는 방법을 제시하고, 그 성능을 측정했다.

• Journal of Korea Game Society
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.53-62
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• 2012

Visualizing a volume dataset with ray-casting which of visualization methods provides high quality image. However it spends too much time for rendering because the size of volume data are huge. Recently, various researches have been proposed to accelerate GPU-based volume rendering to solve these problems. In this paper, we propose an efficient GPU-based empty space skipping to accelerate volume ray-casting using octree traversal. This method creates min-max octree and searches empty space using vertex splitting. It minimizes the bounding polyhedron by eliminating empty space found in the octree traveral step. The rendering results of our method are identical to those of previous GPU-based volume ray-casting, with the advantage of faster run-time because of using minimized bounding polyhedron.

• Journal of the Korea Computer Graphics Society
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.19-27
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• 2013

This paper presents a real-time GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) isosurface ray-caster that improves the performance by 4-7 folds from our previous method, while keeping the superior visual quality. Such an improvement is achieved by incorporating an efficient empty-space skipping scheme and an analytic normal computation. The empty-space skipping scheme is done by building an min/max octree computed from the BB(Bernslein-B$\acute{e}$zier)-form of spline pieces and the analytic normal Formula provides not only a nice visual quality but also an improved evaluation performance.

• Journal of Korea Game Society
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• v.11 no.6
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• pp.71-80
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• 2011

Recent terrain rendering applications such as 3D games and virtual reality, use GPU-based ray-casting method for rendering high-quality scenes in realtime. As the size of terrain dataset grows bigger, the rendering speed will be decreased by the increase of the number of texture samplings. To accelerate the conventional ray-casting, we propose an efficient ray casting method with subdivided bounding boxes which are based-on GPU quadtree traversal. The subdivision of the terrain's bounding box can reduce the empty spaces effectively. By performing the ray-casting with this compact bounding box, we can efficiently reduce computation with empty space skipping. Unlike the recent quadtree-based empty space skipping techniques which perform the tree traversal at each ray, our method traverses the tree only once per frame. Therefore, we can save much computational time.

• Journal of the Korea Computer Graphics Society
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.1-7
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• 2011

Recently, various researches have been proposed to accelerate GPU-based volume ray-casting. However, those researches may cause several problems such as bottleneck of data transmission between CPU and GPU, requirement of additional video memory for hierarchical structure and increase of processing time whenever opacity transfer function changes. In this paper, we propose an efficient GPU-based empty space skipping technique to solve these problems. We store maximum density in a brick of volume dataset on a vertex element. Then we delete vertices regarded as transparent one by opacity transfer function in geometry shader. Remaining vertices are used to generate bounding boxes of non-transparent area that helps the ray to traverse efficiently. Although these vertices are independent on viewing condition they need to be reproduced when opacity transfer function changes. Our technique provides fast generation of opaque vertices for interactive processing since the generation stage of the opaque vertices is running in GPU pipeline. The rendering results of our algorithm are identical to the that of general GPU ray-casting, but the performance can be up to more than 10 times faster.

• Journal of the Korea Computer Graphics Society
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.17-26
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• 2020

We present a real-time GPU(Graphic Processing Unit) marching tetrahedra technique that extracts isosurfaces in the indexed mesh format from BCC(Body Centered Cubic) volume datasets. Compared to classical marching tetrahedra, our method shows better performance with little memory overhead. Our technique is composed of five stages. In the first stage, which needs to be done only once, we build min/max blocks that is to be used for empty space skipping to boost the performance. Next, we extract active blocks that contain the current isovalue. In the next two stages, we extract the edges and cells that contain the isosurface and then the final triangular mesh is generated in the last stage. When applied 512³ or higher resolution volume dataset, our technique shows up to 5 times speed improvement compared to the classical marching tetrahedra algorithm.