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                        Point-Based Volume Rendering

Point-based surface rendering has recently come into vogue to replace,
or at least augment, the presently wide-spread polygonal rendering,
with the rational being that small surface detail can be more
faithfully, and presumably also more efficiently, represented by
atomic points instead of many tiny polygons. This new trend, and the
associated hardware that may emerge along these lines, also gives a
great boost for point-based volume rendering, a popular rendering
technique widely known as Splatting. Volume rendering is attractive as
it considers the entire space filled by the object, and not just its
surface, which, however, leads to a higher computational
complexity. Splatting is an attractive rendering method as it provides
a natural compression of the dataset as well as great rendering
simplicity. In this talk, I will present some of my past and current
work on splatting, and I will also address some of the issues related
to point-based representations that are unique to volume rendering.X