A framework for GPU‐accelerated exploration of massive time‐varying rectilinear scalar volumes. (10th July 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Marton, Fabio; Agus, Marco; Gobbetti, Enrico
• Is Part Of: Computer graphics forum. Volume 38:Number 3(2019)
• Page Start: 53
• Page End: 66
• Publication Date: 2019-07-10
• Subjects: CCS Concepts -- Human‐centered computing → Scientific visualization -- Computing methodologies → Computer graphics -- Graphics systems and interfaces; Computer graphics -- Periodicals; 006.605
• DOI: 10.1111/cgf.13671
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0167-7055

Abstract

Abstract: We introduce a novel flexible approach to spatiotemporal exploration of rectilinear scalar volumes. Our out‐of‐core representation, based on per‐frame levels of hierarchically tiled non‐redundant 3D grids, efficiently supports spatiotemporal random access and streaming to the GPU in compressed formats. A novel low‐bitrate codec able to store into fixed‐size pages a variable‐rate approximation based on sparse coding with learned dictionaries is exploited to meet stringent bandwidth constraint during time‐critical operations, while a near‐lossless representation is employed to support high‐quality static frame rendering. A flexible high‐speed GPU decoder and raycasting framework mixes and matches GPU kernels performing parallel object‐space and image‐space operations for seamless support, on fat and thin clients, of different exploration use cases, including animation and temporal browsing, dynamic exploration of single frames, and high‐quality snapshots generated from near‐lossless data. The quality and performance of our approach are demonstrated on large data sets with thousands of multi‐billion‐voxel frames.