Compressed Volume Rendering using Deep Learning

Published

October 2, 2017

Author(s)

Wesley N. Griffin, Afzal A. Godil, Jeffrey W. Bullard, Judith E. Terrill, Amitabh Varshney, Somay Jain

Abstract

Scientific simulations often generate large amounts of multivariate time varying volumetric data. Visualizing these volumes is essential for understanding the underlying scientific processes which generate this data. In this paper, we present a method to obtain a data-driven compact representation of the given volumes using a deep convolutional autoencoder network. We show that the autoencoder learns high level hierarchical features, giving insights about the distribution of the underlying data. Moreover, the compact representation has surprisingly low storage requirements which enables it to fit on the Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) memory. The compact representation for a given time step is efficiently decompressed using GPUs to achieve interactive speeds for rendering and navigating large time varying datasets. Finally, the compact representation can also be used to transmit very large volumes over bandwidth sensitive networks. We show that our proposed compact representation takes only 7% of the original memory and reconstructs the original volume with minimal error.

Proceedings Title

Proceedings of the Large Scale Data Analysis and Visualization (LDAV) Symposium

Conference Dates

October 2, 2017

Conference Location

Phoenix, AZ

Conference Title

Large Scale Data Analysis and Visualization (LDAV) Symposium

Pub Type

Conferences

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Keywords

Convolutional autoencoder neural network, Volume rendering

Citation

Griffin, W. , Godil, A. , Bullard, J. , Terrill, J. , Varshney, A. and Jain, S. (2017), Compressed Volume Rendering using Deep Learning, Proceedings of the Large Scale Data Analysis and Visualization (LDAV) Symposium, Phoenix, AZ, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=923526 (Accessed October 9, 2025)