Display of Surfaces from Volume Data
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
Accelerated volume rendering and tomographic reconstruction using texture mapping hardware
VVS '94 Proceedings of the 1994 symposium on Volume visualization
A volumetric method for building complex models from range images
SIGGRAPH '96 Proceedings of the 23rd annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
HWWS '00 Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH/EUROGRAPHICS workshop on Graphics hardware
Photographic tone reproduction for digital images
Proceedings of the 29th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
Volume-rendered galactic animations
Communications of the ACM
Optical Models for Direct Volume Rendering
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Inverse rendering for computer graphics
Inverse rendering for computer graphics
Constrained Inverse Volume Rendering for Planetary Nebulae
VIS '04 Proceedings of the conference on Visualization '04
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From our terrestrially confined viewpoint, the actual three-dimensional shape of distant astronomical objects is, in general, very challenging to determine. For one class of astronomical objects, however, spatial structure can be recovered from conventional 2D images alone. So-called planetary nebulae (PNe) exhibit pronounced symmetry characteristics that come about due to fundamental physical processes. Making use of this symmetry constraint, we present a technique to automatically recover the axisymmetric structure of many planetary nebulae from photographs. With GPU-based volume rendering driving a nonlinear optimization, we estimate the nebula's local emission density as a function of its radial and axial coordinates and we recover the orientation of the nebula relative to Earth. The optimization refines the nebula model and its orientation by minimizing the differences between the rendered image and the original astronomical image. The resulting model allows creating realistic 3D visualizations of these nebulae, for example, for planetarium shows and other educational purposes. In addition, the recovered spatial distribution of the emissive gas can help astrophysicists gain deeper insight into the formation processes of planetary nebulae.