Prefiltered gradient reconstruction for volume rendering

Abstract

The quality of images generated by volume rendering strongly depends on the applied continuous reconstruction method. Recently, it has been shown that the reconstruction of the underlying function can be improved by a discrete prefiltering. In volume rendering, however, an accurate gradient reconstruction also plays an important role as it provides the surface normals for the shading computations. Therefore, in this paper, we propose prefiltering schemes in order to increase the accuracy of the estimated gradients yielding higher image quality. We search for discrete prefilters of minimal support which can be efficiently used in a preprocessing as well as on the fly.