A realtime ray casting system for voxel streams on the cell broadband engine

In this paper the authors introduce a volume rendering system designed for the Cell Broadband Engine that only requires a minimum of two voxel slices at a time to perform image synthesis of a volume data set for a fixed number of user defined views. This allows rendering volume data in a streaming fashion and makes it possible to overlap rendering with data acquisition. Imagine a screening line at the airport where luggage is examined with an x-ray machine. As luggage passes through the scanner multiple x-ray samples are taken from which 2D voxel slices are derived. These finally form a full volume data set that needs to be displayed for quick analysis. Traditional software volume rendering systems are impractical for such a task as they require the volume data set to be fully available for image synthesis and thus need to wait until the x-raying process has finished. This solution is better suited for the depicted situation and related problems as it is able to perform time-critical rendering in parallel with volume generation.