Survey on Transfer Functions in Volume Visualization

For understanding sophisticated volumetric data,volume visualization is widely applied in many area ranging from scientific research,engineering,and medical diagnosis.Transfer functions,which are often specified by users,transforms the data values into colors and opacities,thus the rendering algorithms can generate the volume visualization results.In this paper,we summarize the basics and the state-of-the-art research works on transfer functions,including data-centric and image-based transfer functions,as well as the novel user interface for transfer function design.We also discuss the future research in transfer functions.