Patent ID: 7460119

Claim:
A method of accelerating texture-based volume rendering, comprising: (a) building a plurality of levels of granularity comprising a plurality of sub-volumes organized in a hierarchical structure, wherein the hierarchical structure is ordered top-down from a coarsest level of granularity to a finest level of a granularity; (b) determining a visibility factor for each of the plurality of sub-volumes, wherein the visibility factor represents a ratio of visible voxels in the corresponding sub-volume; (c) traversing the plurality of sub-volumes top-down from the coarsest level of granularity to the finest level of granularity; and (d) while traversing each of the plurality of sub-volumes in step (c), rendering via a processor the corresponding sub-volume and skipping all children of the rendered sub-volume, if the visibility factor is greater than a given threshold.