Accelerating the Volume Rendering in Virtual Endoscopy

Based on the facts that in virtual endoscopy there are many empty voxels and the human vision is more sensitive to near scene, our accelerating algorithm divides the rendering process into near scene and far scene parts. An accelerated ray-casting method is adapted for rendering the near scene and a fast splatting method is adapted for rendering the far scene. The inherent coherence existed in adjacent frames is used to accelerate the navigation speed. A part of far scene of the next frame may be generated by simply transforming part of far scene of the current frame.