I’ve tried to use these multiple scattering approximations in ParaView, but the resulting images looked messy and artificial. The computation was also really slow and on some computers it did not work at all. Most of the medical examples that were showcased in Kitware blogs looked quite odd, too, they looked different but not really better than plain volume rendering.
With the help of @pieper and @LucasGandel we implemented two improvements in VTK and 3D Slicer that dramatically improve clarity and depth perception in volume rendering of medical images:
- colorized rendering (coloring images using AI-generated masks and take the alpha channel from the original image)
- screen-space ambient occlusion (SSAO) for volume rendering
The methods are computationally inexpensive, so they are usable on everyday computers or for demanding applications, such as virtual reality.
Example renderings:
See more details here:
This is just the beginning, as lots of additional tuning and improvements are possible.