Min-Max Octree Generation Using CUDA

Volume rendering is a method which extracts meaningful information from volume data and visualizes those information. In general, since the size of volume data gets larger, it is very important to devise acceleration methods for interactive rendering speed. Min-max octree is data structure for high-speed volume rendering, however, its creation time becomes long as the data size increases. In this paper, we propose acceleration method of min-max octree generation using CUDA. Firstly, we convert one-dimensional array from volume data using space filling curve. Then we make min-max octree structures from the sequential array and apply them to acceleration of volume ray casting.