Hardware-software-balanced resampling for the interactive visualization of unstructured grids

• Published in: Proceedings of the conference on Visualization '01 pp. 199 - 206
• Main Authors: Weiler, Manfred, Ertl, Thomas
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: Washington, DC, USA IEEE Computer Society 21.10.2001
• Series: ACM Conferences
• Subjects: Computing methodologies > Artificial intelligence > Computer vision > Image and video acquisition; Computing methodologies > Symbolic and algebraic manipulation > Symbolic and algebraic algorithms; Information systems > Information retrieval > Evaluation of retrieval results; Mathematics of computing > Mathematical analysis > Differential equations > Partial differential equations; Theory of computation > Design and analysis of algorithms
• ISBN: 9780780372009; 078037200X
• DOI: 10.5555/601671.601702

In this paper we address the problem of interactively resampling unstructured grids. Three algorithms are presented. They all allow adaptive resampling of an unstructured grid on a multiresolution hierarchy of arbitrarily sized cartesian grids according to a varying element size. Two of the algorithms presented take advantage of hardware accelerated polygon rendering and 2D texture mapping. In exploiting new features of modern PC graphics adapters, the first algorithm tries to significantly minimize the number of polygons to be rendered. Reducing rasterization requirements is the main goal of the second algorithm, which distributes the computational workload differently between the main processor and the graphics chip. By comparing them to a new pure software approach, an optimal software-hardware balance is studied. We end up with a hybrid approach which greatly improves the performance of hardware-assisted resampling by involving the main processor to a higher degree and thus enabling resampling at nearly interactive rates.