Splatting of curvilinear volumes

This paper presents a splatting algorithm for volume rendering of curvilinear grids. A stochastic sampling technique called Poisson sphere/ellipsoid sampling is employed to adaptively resample a curvilinear grid with a set of randomly distributed points whose energy support extents are well approximated by spheres and ellipsoids. Filter kernels corresponding to these spheres and ellipsoids are used to generate the volume-rendered image of the curvilinear grid with a conventional footprint evaluation algorithm. Experimental results show that our approach can be regarded as an alternative to existing fast volume rendering techniques of curvilinear grids.