Abstract
Photographic volumes have been increasingly used in medical and biological researches in recent years. The original colors kept in photographic volumes present great opportunities to capture a rich set of information within the dataset for a wide variety of data analysis and visualization applications. Despite years of research, an interactive and user-friendly transfer function is still lacking for photographic volume visualization. The difficulty lies in how to map colors to a space that is convenient and intuitive for users to interactively classify features, i.e., specifying opacities for voxels. In this paper, we propose a color-based transfer function for intuitive opacity specification of photographic volumes. The color-based transfer function intelligently maps the colors from 3D to 1D, resulting in 256 representative colors which preserve the original colors to the maximum extent. Users can directly classify voxels based on these representative colors similar to the conventional 1D transfer function. Experiments are performed to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, and also demonstrate the intuitiveness and flexibility of the proposed method.
Graphical Abstract
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Caban JJ, Rheingans P (2008) Texture-based transfer functions for direct volume rendering. Vis Comput Graph IEEE Trans 14(6):1364–1371
Correa C, Ma KL (2008) Size-based transfer functions: A new volume exploration technique. Vis Comput Graph IEEE Trans 14(6):1380–1387
Correa C, Ma KL (2011) Visibility histograms and visibility-driven transfer functions. Vis Comput Graph IEEE Trans 17(2):192–204
Dogdas B, Stout D, Chatziioannou AF, Leahy RM (2007) Digimouse: a 3d whole body mouse atlas from ct and cryosection data. Phys Med Biol 52(3):577
Ebert DS, Morris CJ, Rheingans P, Yoo TS (2002) Designing effective transfer functions for volume rendering from photographic volumes. Vis Comput Graph IEEE Trans 8(2):183–197
Eisemann E, Durand F (2004) Flash photography enhancement via intrinsic relighting. ACM Trans Graph (TOG) 23(3):673–678
Gargesha M, Qutaish M, Roy D, Steyer G, Bartsch H, Wilson DL (2009) Enhanced volume rendering techniques for high-resolution color cryo-imaging data. In: SPIE Medical Imaging, International Society for Optics and Photonics, pp 72,622V–72,622V
Gooch AA, Olsen SC, Tumblin J, Gooch B (2005) Color2gray: salience-preserving color removal. ACM Trans Graph (TOG) 24(3):634–639
Guo H, Mao N, Yuan X (2011) Wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) volume visualization. Vis Comput Graph IEEE Trans 17(12):2106–2114
Kindlmann G, Durkin JW (1998) Semi-automatic generation of transfer functions for direct volume rendering. In: Proceedings of the 1998 IEEE symposium on Volume visualization, ACM, pp 79–86
Lu C, Xu L, Jia J (2012) Real-time contrast preserving decolorization. In: SIGGRAPH Asia 2012 Technical Briefs, ACM, New York, NY, USA, SA ’12, pp 34:1–34,4
Petschnigg G, Szeliski R, Agrawala M, Cohen M, Hoppe H, Toyama K (2004) Digital photography with flash and no-flash image pairs. ACM Trans Graph (TOG) 23(3):664–672
Pfister H, Lorensen B, Bajaj C, Kindlmann G, Schroeder W, Avila LS, Raghu K, Machiraju R, Lee J (2001) The transfer function bake-off. Comput Graph Appl IEEE 21(3):16–22
Roettger S, Bauer M, Stamminger M (2005) Spatialized transfer functions. In: Proceedings of the 7th Joint Eurographics/IEEE VGTC conference on Visualization, pp 271–278
Roy D, Steyer GJ, Gargesha M, Stone ME, Wilson DL (2009) 3d cryo-imaging: A very high-resolution view of the whole mouse. Anat Record 292(3):342–351
Ruiz M, Bardera A, Boada I, Viola I, Feixas M, Sbert M (2011) Automatic transfer functions based on informational divergence. Vis Comput Graph IEEE Trans 17(12):1932–1941
Sereda P, Bartroli AV, Serlie IW, Gerritsen FA (2006) Visualization of boundaries in volumetric data sets using lh histograms. Vis Comput Graph IEEE Trans 12(2):208–218
Song Y, Bao L, Xu X, Yang Q (2013) Decolorization: Is rgb2gray() out? In: SIGGRAPH Asia 2013 Technical Briefs, ACM, New York, NY, USA, SA ’13, pp 15:1–15:4
Spitzer V, Ackerman MJ, Scherzinger AL, Whitlock D (1996) The visible human male: a technical report. J Am Med Inf Assoc 3(2):118–130
Takanashi I, Lum EB, Ma KL, Muraki S (2002) Ispace: Interactive volume data classification techniques using independent component analysis. In: Proceedings of Pacific Graphics 2002 Conference, pp 366–374
Zhang SX, Heng PA, Liu ZJ (2006) Chinese visible human project. Clin Anat 19(3):204–215
Acknowledgments
This work was partially supported by 863 Program Project 2012AA12A404, National Natural Science Foundation of China No. 61472354 and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2013QNA5010).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Zhang, B., Tao, Y., Lin, H. et al. Intuitive transfer function design for photographic volumes. J Vis 18, 571–580 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12650-014-0267-5
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12650-014-0267-5