• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.14 no.8
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• pp.981-991
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• 2011

MIP(Maximum Intensity Projection) is a volume rendering technique which is essential for the medical imaging system. MIP rendering based on the ray casting method produces high quality images but takes a long time. Our aim is improvement of the rendering speed using GPGPU(General-purpose computing on Graphic Process Unit) technique. In this paper, we present the ray casting algorithm based on CUDA(an acronym for Compute Unified Device Architecture) which is a programming language for GPGPU and we suggest new acceleration methods for CUDA. In detail, we propose the block based space leaping which skips unnecessary regions of volume data for CUDA, the bisection method which is a fast method to find a block edge, and the initial value estimation method which improves the probability of space leaping. Due to the proposed methods, we noticeably improve the rendering speed without image quality degradation.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.512-520
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• 2009

Maximum intensity projection (MIP) is a volume rendering method which extracts maximum values along the viewing direction through volume data. It visualizes high-density structures, such as angio-graphic datasets so that it is frequently used in medical imaging systems. We have proposed an efficient two-step MIP acceleration method that uses the recent CPUs. First, we exploited SIMD instructions to reduce conditional branch instructions which take up a considerable part of whole rendering process, so that we improved rendering speed. Second, we proposed a new method, which accesses volume and image data successively by modifying the shear-warp rendering. This method improves memory access patterns so that cache misses are reduced. Using the current CPUs, our method improved the rendering speed by a factor of 7 than that of the shear-warp rendering.