VolumeEVM: A new approach for surface/volume integration

Volume visualization is a very active research area in the field of scientific visualization. The main techniques of volume visualization are surface rendering and direct volume rendering. In recent works, the extreme vertices model (EVM) has been used as an intermediate model to visualize and manipulate volume data using a surface rendering approach. However, the ability to integrate the advantages of surface rendering approaches with the superiority in visual exploration of volume rendering would allow one to obtain a very complete framework for visualization and manipulation of volume data. In this paper, the VolumeEVM is presented as an enhanced EVM-based model. It incorporates the volumetric information required to achieve a nearly direct volume visualization technique. Thus, a new surface/volume integrated model is defined based on the EVM encoding. Also, an algorithm following the splatting technique and using the VolumeEVM has been devised.