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Re-Projection of Terabyte-sized 3D Images for Interactive Visualization
Published
Author(s)
Peter Bajcsy, Antoine Vandecreme, Mary C. Brady
Abstract
How does one inspect terabyte-sized 3D images visually from multiple viewpoints? The current solutions are limited to gigabyte-sized images using specialized hardware to achieve interactivity and lacking the ability to share data for collaborative research. We address this problem by designing five re-projection algorithms for 3D images to enable their interactive visualization from multiple viewpoints in a web browser using the Deep Zoom pyramid representation for large 2D images. Terabyte-sized 3D images are represented as an ordered set of either 2D cross sections or Deep Zoom pyramids. Five re-projection algorithms for the two 3D image representations are analyzed theoretically and experimentally in terms of their computational time and memory complexities on a single machine and on a computer cluster with the Hadoop platform. All theoretical analyses and experimental benchmarks have been applied to microscopy images from the surface material science and cell biology domains that are deployed at NIST for interactive web browsing, sampling and measurements. Our contributions lie in (a) designing a new approach to 3D re-projection of terabyte-sized images from a set of Deep Zoom pyramids, (b) characterizing computational memory complexities of re-projection algorithms on multiple hardware platforms, and (c) maximizing the speed-up of 3D re-projection computations on Hadoop computer clusters with respect to a single computer by optimal selection of configuration parameters.
Citation
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Pub Type
Journals
Keywords
3D image re-projection, Deep Zoom pyramid, computational complexity
Bajcsy, P.
, Vandecreme, A.
and Brady, M.
(2013),
Re-Projection of Terabyte-sized 3D Images for Interactive Visualization, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
(Accessed October 14, 2025)