Hardware Assisted Fast Volume Rendering with Boundary Enhancement

In this paper, a new volume rendering method with boundary enhancement is presented. The boundary is extracted and represented by surfaces explicitly. Then, using 3D texture mapping and graphics acceleration hardware, the volume data can be rendered with controllable boundary shading effect almost in real time. Test shows that this method is 4-5 times faster than the previous methods. Moreover, it can also be extended to render the surfaces and the volumetric data together interactively.