3D reconstruction and visualization of spiral galaxies

Abstract

Spiral Galaxies are among the most stunning objects in the night sky. However, reconstructing a 3D volumetric model of these astronomical objects from conventional 2D images is a hard problem, since we are restricted to our terrestrial point of view. This work consists of two contributions. First, we employ a physically motivated, GPU-based volume rendering algorithm which models the complex interplay of scattering and extinction of light in interstellar space. Making use of general galactic shape information and far-infrared data, we secondly present a new approach to recover 3D volumes of spiral galaxies from conventional 2D images. We achieve this by an analysis-by-synthesis optimization using our rendering algorithm to minimize the difference between the rendition of the reconstructed volume and the input galaxy image. The presented approach yields a plausible volumetric structure of spiral galaxies which is suitable for creating 3D visualization, e.g., for planetarium shows or other educational purposes.