Light Source Placement Design for Topologically-Enhanced Volume Rendering

In order for volume rendering to convey the features of a given volume dataset effectively, it is required to design the illumination environment with which we can provide enriched depth cues for the rendered features, as well as to specify the transfer functions which emphasize the features, to locate the viewpoint in such a way as to minimize the occlusion artifacts among the projected features. In this paper, we strive to extend the conventional illumination entropy-based framework for surface models to come up with a novel method for finding an optimal location of light source for further enhancing differential topology features embedded within the volume. The feasibility of the proposed method is empirically proven through several experiments with practical datasets for the case with a single parallel light source. The extensibility of the method to the problem of multi light sources placement is also discussed.