System and method for empty space skipping in sliding texture based volume rendering by trimming slab polygons

A method of volume rendering a digitized image, comprising the steps of:

• providing a pair of adjacent 2-dimensional images of texture data;
• identifying a plurality of polygons extending in slabs between said adjacent two dimensional textures;
• finding the first and last visible voxel for the data rows and data columns of each said polygon,
• saving said associated minimum and maximum bounds of each data row and for each data column;
• and
• trimming the polygon to the minimum and maximum bounds of the data rows and data columns;
• and
• rendering said polygons along a direction orthogonal to a dominant viewing direction, wherein rendering comprises interpolating for each trimmed polygon data from intersections of the polygons with adjacent two dimensional polygons, and interpolating between the polygons of the plurality of polygons.

A program storage device readable by a computer, tangibly embodying a program of instructions executable by the computer to perform the method steps for volume rendering a digitized image, said method comprising the steps of:

• providing a pair of adjacent 2-dimensional images of texture data;
• identifying a plurality of polygons extending in slabs between said adjacent two dimensional textures;
• finding the first and last visible voxel for the data rows and data columns of each said polygon, wherein the minimum and maximum bounds of each data row and for each data column are determined;
• marking those data rows and data columns as invisible that do not contain any visible voxels;
• and
• rendering said polygons along a direction orthogonal to a dominant viewing direction, wherein rendering of texture data is restricted by the outer bounds of said polygons that are trimmed to the minimum and maximum bounds of two neighboring data rows or data columns, and wherein those data rows and data columns marked as invisible are skipped.