Multiresolution MIP rendering of large volumetric data accelerated on graphics hardware

This paper is concerned with a multiresolution representation for maximum intensity projection (MIP) volume rendering based on morphological pyramids which allows progressive refinement. We consider two algorithms for progressive rendering from the morphological pyramid: one which projects detail coefficients level by level, and a second one, called streaming MIP, which resorts the detail coefficients of all levels simultaneously with respect to decreasing magnitude of a suitable error measure. The latter method outperforms the level-by-level method, both with respect to image quality with a fixed amount of detail data, and in terms of flexibility of controlling approximation error or computation time. We improve the streaming MIP algorithm, present a GPU implementation for both methods, and perform a comparison with existing CPU and GPU implementations.