Memory and processing architecture for 3D voxel-based imagery
- 1 November 1988
- journal article
- Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
- Vol. 8 (6), 10-23
- https://doi.org/10.1109/38.20314
Abstract
A versatile voxel-based architecture for 3-D volume visualization, called the Cube architecture, is introduced. A small-scale prototype of the architecture has been realized in hardware and has been operating in true real-time, faster than the alternative voxel systems. The Cube architecture is centered around a 3-D cubic frame buffer, of voxels, and it entertains three processors that access the frame buffer to input sampled and synthetic data, to manipulate the 3-D images, and to project and render them. To cope with the huge quantity of voxels and still perform in real-time, two special features were incorporated within the architecture: a unique skewed memory organization, which permits the retrieval and storage of voxels in parallel, and a multiple-write bus, which speeds up the viewing process. These features allow Cube, for example, to project an image of n/sup 3/ voxels in O(n/sup 2/ log n) time rather than the conventional O(n/sup 3/) time.Keywords
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