• Journal of the Korea Computer Graphics Society
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.9-20
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• 2010

In order to visualize participating media in 3D space, they usually calculate the incoming radiance by subdividing the ray path into small subintervals, and accumulating their respective light energy due to direct illumination, scattering, absorption, and emission. Among these light phenomena, scattering behaves in very complicated manner in 3D space, often requiring a great deal of simulation efforts. To effectively simulate the light scattering effect, several approximation techniques have been proposed. Volume photon mapping takes a simple approach where the light scattering phenomenon is represented in volume photon map through a stochastic simulation, and the stored information is explored in the rendering stage. While effective, this method has a problem that the number of necessary photons increases very fast when a higher variance reduction is needed. In an attempt to resolve such problem, we propose a different approach for rendering particle-based volume data where kernel smoothing, one of several density estimation methods, is explored to represent and reconstruct the light in-scattering effect. The effectiveness of the presented technique is demonstrated with several examples of volume data.