Isosurface Ray-casting for Autostereoscopic Displays

Abstract

In this paper the GPU implementation of a real-time isosurface volume-rendering system is described in detail, which aims at autostereoscopic displays. Since autostereoscopic displays provide images for many views, and thus require different camera settings in each pixel, and even in the three color channels of a pixel, naive rendering approaches would slow down the rendering process by a factor of the number of views of the display. To maintain interactive rendering, our approach is image centric, that is, we independently set the eye position for each pixel and implement iso-surface ray-casting in the pixel shader of the GPU. To handle the different camera settings for different color channels, geometric and color computation processes are decomposed into multiple rendering passes. This solution allows rendering rates that are independent of the number of main views of the autostereoscopic display, i.e. we cannot observe speed degradation when real 3D images are generated.