filename     : hadwiger05.pdf
entry        : inproceedings
conference   : Eurographics '05, Dublin, Ireland, Aug 29th - Sep 2nd, 2005
pages        : pp303-312
year         : 2005
month        : September
title        : Real-Time Ray-Casting and Advanced Shading of Discrete Isosurfaces
subtitle     : 
author       : Markus Hadwiger and Christian Sigg and Henning Scharsach and Katja Bühler and Markus Gross
booktitle    : Proceedings of Eurographics '05
ISSN/ISBN    : 
editor       : Marc Alexa and Joe Marks
publisher    : Blackwell Publishing
publ.place   :
volume       : 24
issue        : 3
language     : english
keywords     : isosurface, rendering, curvature
abstract     : This paper presents a real-time rendering pipeline for implicit surfaces defned by a regular volumetric grid of samples. We use a ray-casting approach on current graphics hardware to perform a direct rendering of the isosurface. A two-level hierarchical representation of the regular grid is employed to allow object-order and image-order empty space skipping and circumvent memory limitations of graphics hardware. Adaptive sampling and iterative renement lead to high-quality ray/surface intersections. All shading operations are deferred to image space, making their computational effort independent of the size of the input data. A continuous third-order reconstruction lter allows on-the-y evaluation of smooth normals and extrinsic curvatures at any point on the surface without interpolating data computed at grid points. With these local shape descriptors, it is possible to perform advanced shading using high-quality lighting and non-photorealistic effects in real-time.