Computer Science Research

Volume Fusion

Recent advances in volume visualization and 3D data acquisition techniques have led to a new class of applications involving the modeling, animation, and interactions with volumetric objects, which are not directly supported by traditional computer graphics and geometric modeling techniques. Aiming to enhance conventional graphics and modeling systems for volumetric operations, this research will develop a new volume fusion technique to provide a uniform framework for the interactive modeling and rendering of volumetric scenes. A volumetric scene is defined by a scene expression that constructs volume information by combining multiple 3D objects of heterogeneous representations using various blending and filtering functions. The process of designing and evaluating a volumetric scene expression is called volume fusion. The designing process involves the selection of appropriate blending and filtering functions to represent desired computational tasks of different applications. A space-sweep approach is employed to provide a general computational framework that computes volume information of the scene expression on a 2D slice, which moves across the volume space in regular increments. We will apply this framework to several specific problems to demonstrate the applications and flexibility of this approach, including volumetric CSG modeling, binary CSG voxelization, and volumetric collision detection. Additional applications will also be studied over the course of this research. A major advantage of this approach is that most of the computation can be implemented by hardware features in today's 3D graphics systems, leading to interactive speed for many previously very expensive applications.

Project Presented By

Fang, Shiaofen

Position:	Chair, Professor
Mail:
Phone:	317-274-9731
Url:	http://www.cs.iupui.edu/~sfang

Education Details

Research Interests

My primary research interests are in visualization, biomedical imaging, computer graphics, and geometric modeling. My early research focus had been on Volume Visualization and Volume Graphics. Major projects include deformable volume modeling and rendering, hardware assisted voxelization, volume fusion, 3D microscopy visualization, and immersive volume visualzation. A common theme of these research projects is the efficient and effective visaulization of scientific data. Although this line of research is still a major part of my work, My recent research interests have been shifted more towards the direction of medical image analysis and visual data mining. These include 3D image analysis for medical diagnosis, surface analysis of medical scans, 3D surface reconstruction, and knowledge discovery through information visualization.