Efficient and High-Quality Ray Marched Glyphs for Diffusion Tensor Imaging

Motivation: Traditional rendering engines represent surfaces using simpler polygons (triangles or quads). This discretization can compromise real-time performance as more polygons are required to build smoother surfaces. Goal(s): Develop a new efficient method for building and displaying DTI-related glyphs without compromising their visual quality using continuous geometric representations. Approach: Ray marching is a robust technique for tracing implicit surfaces using signed distance functions (SDFs). Our method uses these techniques to create representations of commonly used DTI-related glyphs. Results: Our SDFs glyphs make it possible to define smooth surfaces in a more efficient way that allows us to visualize more objects than traditional polygon-based renderers. Impact: By using SOTA efficient rendering algorithms for complex elements, such as DTI-related glyphs, we improved the performance of scientific visualization systems, enabling the visualization of more extensive datasets and/or multiple types of data in real-time without sacrificing visual quality.