Key techniques to volume rendering based on graphic hardware

With the ever-increasing development of graphics hardware in recent years, exploiting the fast rendering ability of moderngraphics hardware to make the rendering process genuinely interactive has become available, and this method is the research hot spot.A survey of recent publications concerning volume rendering is presented based on graphics hardware from the following four profiles:classification, shading, reconstruction and volume clipping. The recent researches and typical algorithms of each key technique are de-scribed. Characteristics and relationships of the algorithms are also presented.