Parallel Manifold Space Ray Casting for Height Field Visualization

A novel parallel manifold space ray casting algorithm is proposed to visualize the height field on a spherical domain.The contributions include: a mathematic model for marching rays in curved surface;an accurate analytical solution that is derived based on the manifold mapping theory;a novel ray casting algorithm,called PMSRC(Parallel Manifold Space Ray Casting) that traces rays simultaneously in many manifold spaces;and a novel rasterization technique that employs a uniform mesh to store all quad-tree nodes in GPU memory.The integrated system is proven to be highly efficient and effective.