Interactive morphological and wavelet-based volume processing and visualization (IMOVIS) (2005-2009)

Funding

The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). This project, IMOVIS, is part of the NWO research program VIEW (Visual Interactive Effective Worlds).

People:

• PhD student: Wladimir van der Laan (Subproject 1)
• PhD student: Maarten Everts (Subproject 2: Visualization and Analysis of Diffusion Tensor Data)
• postdoc: Andrei Jalba (Subproject 3)

Project goal

In this project, we study the tight integration of volume processing and visualization to obtain systems which can perform at interactive rates for very large data sets. In particular, we systematically study multi-scale techniques from mathematical morphology and wavelet theory for reduction, feature extraction and real-time visualization of volume data. Also, we study and extend particle systems for interactive feature extraction and segmentation based on physically motivated deformable models, and develop fast methods using tools from mathematical morphology, as an alternative to level-set and (nonlinear) diffusion approaches. For obtaining the required computational speed, we will implement these methods on modern programmable GPU hardware.

Collaboration

The Visualisation and Interactive Systems Institute, University of Stuttgart (headed by Professor Thomas Ertl).

An earlier PhD project in wavelet-based volume rendering was completed by Michel Westenberg in September 2001.