Object Space EWA Surface Splatting: A Hardware Accelerated Approach to High Quality Point Rendering

Elliptical weighted average (EWA) surface splatting is a technique for high quality rendering of point-sampled 3D objects. EWA surface splatting renders water-tight surfaces of complex point models with high quality, anisotropic texture filtering. In this paper we introduce a new multi-pass approach to perform EWA surface splatting on modern PC graphics hardware, called object space EWA splatting. We derive an object space formulation of the EWA filter, which is amenable for acceleration by conventional triangle-based graphics hardware. We describe how to implement the object space EWA filter using a two pass rendering algorithm. In the first rendering pass, visibility splatting is performed by shifting opaque surfel polygons backward along the viewing rays, while in the second rendering pass view-dependent EWA prefiltering is performed by deforming texture mapped surfel polygons. We use texture mapping and alpha blending to facilitate the splatting process. We implement our algorithm using programmable vertex and pixel shaders, fully exploiting the capabilities of today's graphics processing units (GPUs). Our implementation renders up to 3 million points per second on recent PC graphics hardware, an order of magnitude more than a pure software implementation of screen space EWA surface splatting. Categories and Subject Descriptors (according to ACM CCS): I.3.3 Computer Graphics: Display Algorithms