Giga-voxel rendering from compressed data on a display wall

Abstract

We present a parallel system capable of rendering multi-gigabyte data sets on a multi-megapixel display wall at interactive rates. The system is based on Residual Vector Quantization which allows us to render extremely large data sets out of the graphics memory. At 0.75 bits per voxel, such large data sets can even be kept on a consumerlevel graphics card. As an example we compress the whole full color “Visible Human Female” data set, approximately 21GByte in size, down to 700MByte. Taking advantage of the fixed code length and the extremely simple decompression scheme of RVQ, all decompression is done on the GPU at very high rates. For each frame the data set is decompressed into small subvolumes which are rendered front to back. Classification and shading can be moved into the decompression step, speeding up the rendering pass.