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Chuan-Kai Yang and Tzi-Cker Chiueh+
Department of Information Management
National Taiwan University of Science and Technology
Taipei, 106 Taiwan
+Department of Computer Science
Stony Brook University
Stony Brook, NY 11770, U.S.A.
Very large irregular-grid volume datasets are typically represented as tetrahedral
meshes and require substantial disk I/O and rendering computation. One effective way to
reduce this demanding resource requirement is compression. Previous research showed
how rendering and decompression of a losslessly compressed irregular-grid dataset can
be integrated into a one-pass computation. This work advances the state of the art one
step further by showing that a losslessly compressed irregular volume dataset can be
simplified while it is being decompressed and that simplification, decompression, and
rendering can again be integrated into a pipeline that requires only a single pass through
the datasets. In particular, this rendering pipeline can exploit a multi-resolution representation
to maintain interactivity on a given hardware/software platform by automatically
adjusting the amount of rendering computation that could be afforded, or performing
so called time-critical rendering. As a proof of the feasibility of our proposed framework,
we modify an existing tetrahedral mesh simplification algorithm and integrate it
with our previous volume decompression and rendering pipeline. Performance measurements
on this prototype system show that simplification only adds less than 5% of
performance overhead on and average; furthermore, with multi-resolution pre-simplification
the end-to-end rendering delay indeed decreases in an approximately linear fashion
with respect to the simplification ratio, thus a time-critical rendering of large tetrahedral
mesh could be achieved.
Received August 3, 2005; revised December 14, 2005 & November 2, 2006; accepted November 8, 2006.
Communicated by Nancy M. Amato and H. Y. Mark Liao.
*This work was supported in part by the National Science Council of Taiwan, R.O.C., under grants No. NSC
95-3114-P-001-002-Y02, NSC 94-3114-P-001-003-Y, NSC 94-3114-P-011-001, and NSC 91-2218-E-011-
005-.