Recent advances in hardware-accelerated volume rendering

The programmability and texture support of consumer graphics accelerators have drawn a lot of attention from visualization researchers, resulting in some very important advances in interactive volume data visualization. For many applications, scientists can now perform routine data visualization and analysis tasks on their desktop PC with a consumer graphics card that was designed mainly for playing video games. This paper presents several representative hardware-accelerated algorithms that have been introduced recently to address the problems of classification, illumination, non-photorealistic rendering, decoding, and image compositing in volume data visualization.