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Cited by 991

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 25 of the 25 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Efficient ray tracing of volume data

Open access
Levoy, Marc·1990·ACM Transactions on Graphics

Abstract

Volume rendering is a technique for visualizing sampled scalar or vector fields of three spatial dimensions without fitting geometric primitives to the data. A subset of these techniques generates images by computing 2-D projections of a colored semitransparent volume, where the color and opacity at each point are derived from the data using local operators. Since all voxels participate in the generation of each image, rendering time grows linearly with the size of the dataset. This paper presents a front-to-back image-order volume-rendering algorithm and discusses two techniques for improving its performance. The first technique employs a pyramid of binary volumes to encode spatial coherence present in the data, and the second technique uses an opacity threshold to adaptively terminate ray tracing. Although the actual time saved depends on the data, speedups of an order of magnitude have been observed for datasets of useful size and complexity. Examples from two applications are given: medical imaging and molecular graphics.

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Metadata

Authors
Levoy, M.
Venue
ACM Transactions on Graphics
Published
1990-07
Volume
9
Issue
3
Pages
245-261
ISSN
  • 0730-0301 (ISSN-L)
  • 1557-7368
OpenAlex
W2126521141
Cited by
991
References
25
FWCI
29.57
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
bronze

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Efficient ray tracing of volume data. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1145/78964.78965
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Levoy, M. (1990). Efficient ray tracing of volume data. ACM Transactions on Graphics. https://doi.org/10.1145/78964.78965

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.