Overview of the research on Volume Analysis and Rendering
Our research in Volume analysis and rendering started in 1989 under a research contract with the EEC. The principal aim of the project, now concluded, was to develop a system to test and inspect technical ceramics using X-Ray Voludensitometry.
A special scanner has been realised by Intercontrol (Paris) and Leti (Grenoble), based on a microfocus device, and on conic projection to minimise effects due to non isotropy, typical of slice scanners.
Polytechnic of Madrid tuned an efficient algorithm to reconstruct a volume from multiple conic projections; while Regie Renault (Paris) provided specification of some typical part to be produced by Fairey Techramics (Manchester). Our Laboratory developed EVA-VisualStudio to display, classify and inspect reconstructed volume data.
The focus of our research is on five aspects:
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high quality rendering of a data set, using a variety of methods: threshold, mixture models with percentage classification, x-ray simulation;
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ray tracing and splatting rendering methods;
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semi automatic classification, based on interactive manipulation of histogram to select thresholds to be used for the different rendering methods;
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easy to use interactive and standard system;
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porting of the rendering engine on supercomputer and parallel machine
(Paragon Intel, KSR1, Convex) to improve rendering speed on big data
sets.
The new version X_EVA, is based on Motif and is portable on most Unix workstations; it is available in public domain.
References
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Gatti C., Marini D., Minardi P., "An Interactive System for Volume Analysis", in: Palamidese P. Ed. Scientific Visualisation, Advanced Software Techniques, Ellis Horwood Ltd., New York (1993)
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Gatti C., Marini D., Minardi P., "A Probabilistic Approach to Voxel Classification", Eurographics Workshop on Computer Graphics and Mathematics, Santa Margherita Ligure (1991)
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Morisseau P., Martin M., Sire P., Pastor L., Marini D., Gatti C., Taylor D., Gounet C., "X_ray voludensitometry: Applications to the testing of technical ceramics", 13th World Conference on Non Destructive testing, Sao Paulo (1992)
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V. Accomazzi, D. Bordegari, C. Gatti, D. Marini, "EVA-VisualStudio: un sistema per la analisi e visualizzazione di imagini tridimensionali per il test e la diagnosi non distruttiva", Pixel 14, 6/7 (1993)