Since volume rendering needs a lot of computation time and memory space, many researches have been suggested for accelerating rendering or reducing data size using compression techniques. However, there is little progress in a research for accomplishing these goals. This paper presents an efficient wavelet-based compression method providing fast visualization of large volume data, which is divided into individual blocks with regular resolution. Wavelet transformed block is runlength encoded in accordance with the reconstruction order resulting in a fairly good compression ratio and fast reconstruction. A cache data structure is designed to speed up the reconstruction, and an adaptive compression scheme is proposed to produce a higher quality rendered image. The compression method proposed here is combined with several accelerated volume rendering algorithms, such as brute-force volume rendering with min-max table and Lacroute's shear-warp factorization. Experimental results have shown the space requirement to be about 1/27 and the rendering time to be about 3 seconds for 512/spl times/512/spl times/512 data sets while preserving the quality of an image much like using the original data.
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