Institute for Data Analysis and Visualization

In this paper we describe a rendering method suitable for interactive previewing of large-scale arbitary-mesh volume data sets. A data set to be visualized is represented by a ''point cloud,'' i. e., a set of points and associated data values without known connectivity between the points. The method uses a multi-resolution approach to achieve interactive rendering rates of several frames per second for arbitrarily large data sets. Lower-resolution approximations of an original data set are created by iteratively applying a point- decimation operation to higher-resolution levels. The goal of this method is to provide the user with an interactive navigation and exploration tool to determine good viewpoints and transfer functions to pass on to a high-quality volume renderer that uses a standard algorithm.