An enhanced filtering-based approach to approximate volumetric ambient occlusion Online publication date: Mon, 26-Feb-2018
by Naima Bahi; Mohamed Chaouki Babahenini
International Journal of Biomedical Engineering and Technology (IJBET), Vol. 26, No. 3/4, 2018
Abstract: Achieving, through shading, a good visualisation of scientific volumetric data sets is prohibitive for interactive applications due to a significant amount of existing occlusion effects and lighting variation. Ambient occlusion, although allowing us to understand these data through soft shadows, often comes with an important cost of pre-processing which prevents its use especially in the applications based on the transfer function editing. In this paper, we present a new method for approximating ambient occlusion for volumetric data using an exponential function which allows for high-quality hardware-accelerated filtering and leads us to achieve more compact information using a filterable representation in order to avoid the classic occlusion test with a binary manner. Our evaluation of a series of medical images demonstrates that the proposed algorithm provides smooth shading, producing high quality results, achieves an interactive rate and consumes less memory.
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