Comparison of Distance Transforms in Space-leaping for High Speed Fetal Ultrasound Volume Visualization

In real time rendering of fetus the empty space leaping while traversing a ray is most frequently used accelerating technique. The main idea is to skip empty voxel samples which do not contribute the result image and it speeds up the rendering time by avoiding sampling data while traversing a ray in the empty region, saving a substantial number of interpolations. Calculating the distance from the nearest object boundary for every yokel can reduce the sampling operation. Among widely-well-known distance maps, those estimates the true distance, such as euclidean distance, takes a long time to compute because of the complicated floating-point operations, and others which uses approximated distance functions, such as city-block and chessboard, provides faster computation time but sampling error may can occur. In this paper, therefore, we analyze the characteristics of several distance maps and compare the number of samples and rendering time. And we aim to suggest the most appropriate distance map for rendering of fetus in ultrasound image.