GPU-Assisted Massive Volume Data Visualisation (GAMVolVis)
GPU-Assisted Massive Volume Data Visualisation
(GAMVolVis)
Start date: Sep 1, 2009,
End date: Aug 31, 2011
PROJECT
FINISHED
High-resolution medical volume data (containing billions of voxels) is used in many clinical applications. However, interactive visualisation of gigabyte-sized volumes on a desktop PC is challenging, due to the heavy computation and the memory consumption. In recent years, the graphics processing unit (GPU) has evolved at an increasing pace, and tremendous improvements have been achieved in its capabilities. GPU performance now substantially exceeds that of CPUs in both the raw computational power provided and its speed of development. Thus, the GPU is now the ideal platform for efficient visualisation for large volume data. However, current methods for rendering large volume datasets are limited, either in performance, accuracy, flexibility or scalability. This project addresses this by presenting techniques to perform volume visualisation of large datasets on off-the-shelf hardware by harnessing the power of GPUs to provide high performance and produce high-quality images. We will achieve this by implementing a multi-resolution framework with two parts: data management on the CPU and real-time rendering on the GPU. We propose a new rendering pipeline by directly treating each volume brick as a single GPU rendering primitive, and efficient cache management to avoid cache thrashing of GPU memory. Forward mapping will allow arbitrariiy many primitives to be rendered on the GPU in a stream-like manner, making our system fully scalable to an arbitrarily large dataset. Further acceleration will be achieved by using a coarsely-fitted proxy geometry, and advanced illumination techniques will be introduced for better quality visualisation at high frame rates. We will also extend our applications from a single GPU to multiple GPUs. The resulting system will allow domain scientists to effectively visualise super-large-scale volume data on moderate PC platforms without being heavily restricted by the data size, which is a key advance from the current state of the art.
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