Depth-dependent Parallel Visualization with 3D Stylized Dense Tubes

Abstract: We present a parallel visualization algorithm for the illustrative rendering of depth-dependent stylized dense tube data at interactive frame rates. While this computation could be efficiently performed on a GPU device, we target a parallel framework to enable it to be efficiently running on an ordinary multi-core CPU platform which is much more available than GPUs for common users. Our approach is to map the depth information in each tube onto each of the visual dimensions of shape, color, texture, value, and size on the basis of Bertin's semiology theory. The purpose is to enable more legible displays in the dense tube environments. A major contribution of our work is an efficient and effective parallel depthordering algorithm that makes use of the message passing interface (MPI) with VTK. We evaluated our framework with visualizations of depth-stylized tubes derived from 3D diffusion tensor MRI data by comparing its efficiency with several other alternative parallelization platforms running the same computations. As our results show, the parallelization framework we proposed can efficiently render highly dense 3D data sets like the tube data and thus is useful as a complement to parallel visualization environments that rely on GPUs.