A Hardware Assisted LDI Building Algorithm with Application to Hybrid Volume Rendering

This paper proposes a new hardware-assisted LDI Building algorithm with application to hybrid volume rendering. It works by creating Layered Depth Image (LDI) using OpenGL. Together with LDI, the scene can be rendered by intermixing segmented volume data and stored depth lists easily. The highlight of our algorithm is that it creates a z-sorting list simply by using depth and stencil buffer in OpenGL. We discussed the implementations, the performance, as well as the accurancy and the optimization of hybrid volume rendering. As z-sorting is the essential problem of visibility in computer graphics, our method is also useful to visibility decision for a large scale polygon environment and IBR-relative application.