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Illustrative Context-Preserving Exploration of Volume Data
November/December 2006 (vol. 12 no. 6)
pp. 1559-1569

Abstract—In volume rendering, it is very difficult to simultaneously visualize interior and exterior structures while preserving clear shape cues. Highly transparent transfer functions produce cluttered images with many overlapping structures, while clipping techniques completely remove possibly important context information. In this paper, we present a new model for volume rendering, inspired by techniques from illustration. It provides a means of interactively inspecting the interior of a volumetric data set in a feature-driven way which retains context information. The context-preserving volume rendering model uses a function of shading intensity, gradient magnitude, distance to the eye point, and previously accumulated opacity to selectively reduce the opacity in less important data regions. It is controlled by two user-specified parameters. This new method represents an alternative to conventional clipping techniques, sharing their easy and intuitive user control, but does not suffer from the drawback of missing context information.

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Index Terms:
Illustrative visualization, focus+context techniques, volume rendering.
Citation:
Stefan Bruckner, S?ren Grimm, Armin Kanitsar, M. Eduard Gr?ller, "Illustrative Context-Preserving Exploration of Volume Data," IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 12, no. 6, pp. 1559-1569, Nov./Dec. 2006, doi:10.1109/TVCG.2006.96
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