QuadStack: An Efficient Representation and Direct Rendering of Layered Datasets

We introduce QuadStack, a novel algorithm for volumetric data compression and direct rendering. Our algorithm exploits the data redundancy often found in layered datasets which are common in science and engineering fields such as geology, biology, mechanical engineering, medicine, etc. QuadStack fir...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Graciano, Alejandro, Rueda-Ruiz, Antonio Jesús, Pospísil, Adam, Bittner, Jirí, Benes, Bedrich
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión aceptada para publicación
Fecha de publicación:2021
País:España
Institución:Universidad de Jaén
Repositorio:RUJA. Repositorio Institucional de la Producción Científica de la Universidad de Jaén
OAI Identifier:oai:ruja.ujaen.es:10953/1387
Acceso en línea:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9040672
https://hdl.handle.net/10953/1387
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Computer graphics
Graphics data structures and data types
Terrain modeling
Descripción
Sumario:We introduce QuadStack, a novel algorithm for volumetric data compression and direct rendering. Our algorithm exploits the data redundancy often found in layered datasets which are common in science and engineering fields such as geology, biology, mechanical engineering, medicine, etc. QuadStack first compresses the volumetric data into vertical stacks which are then compressed into a quadtree that identifies and represents the layered structures at the internal nodes. The associated data (color, material, density, etc.) and shape of these layer structures are decoupled and encoded independently, leading to high compression rates (4× to 54× of the original voxel model memory footprint in our experiments). We also introduce an algorithm for value retrieving from the QuadStack representation and we show that the access has logarithmic complexity. Because of the fast access, QuadStack is suitable for efficient data representation and direct rendering. We show that our GPU implementation performs comparably in speed with the state-of-the-art algorithms (18-79 MRays/s in our implementation), while maintaining a significantly smaller memory footprint.