Accelerating Morphological Analysis with Graphics Hardware.

Direct volume rendering is a common means of visualizing three-dimensional data nowadays. It is, however, still a very time consuming pro-cess to create informative and visual appealing images. Semi-automatic volume analysis proce-dures as morphological operators are a promis-ing approach to improve the overall visualization cycle. However, these operators need quite some time for computation, reducing their usefulness for interactive visualization. Modern graphics hardware, on the other hand, has all necessary functions for doing hardware based morphological filtering. As the problem is mainly memory bandwidth bound, a solution based on graphics hardware can significantly re-duce computation time in the filtering step, as the graphics hardware typically has much broader and faster memory paths. When using graphics hardware for mathe-matical computations, accuracy is usually quite a problem. However, morphological operators map so well onto the graphics pipeline, that no loss of accuracy occurs at all. 1