Abstract
We introduce a new acceleration to the standard splatting volume rendering algorithm. Our method achieves full colour (32-bit), depth-sorted and shaded volume rendering significantly faster than standard splatting. The speedup is due to a 3-dimensional adjacency data structure that efficiently skips transparent parts of the data and stores only the voxels that are potentially visible. Our algorithm is robust and flexible, allowing for depth sorting of the data, including correct back-to-front ordering for perspective projections. This makes interactive splatting possible for applications such as medical visualizations that rely on structure and depth information.
