Date of Award

1-1992

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

First Advisor

Martin R. Stytz, PhD

Abstract

The volume rendering technique known as ray casting or ray tracing is notoriously slow for large volume sizes, yet provides superior images. A technique is needed to accelerate ray tracing volumes without depending on special purpose or parallel computers. The realization and improvements in distributed computing over the past two decades has motivated its use in this work. This thesis explores a technique to speedup ray casting by distributed programming. The work investigates the possibility of dividing the volume among general purpose workstations and casting rays (using Levoy's front-to-back algorithm) through each subvolume independently. The final step being the composition of all subvolume rendered images. Results indicate a 75 percent savings in rendering time by distributed processing over eight processors versus a single processor.

AFIT Designator

AFIT-GCS-ENG-92M-01

DTIC Accession Number

ADA248167

Comments

The author's Vita page is omitted.

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