high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

This thesis presents research carried out for the visualisation of surface anatomy data stored as large range images such as those produced by stereo-photogrammetric, and other triangulation-based capture devices. As part of this research, I explored the use of points as a rendering primitive as opposed to polygons, and the use of range images as the native data representation. Using points as a display primitive as opposed to polygons required the creation of a pipeline that solved problems associated with point-based rendering. The problems investigated were scattered-data interpolation (a common problem with point-based rendering), multi-view rendering, multi-resolution representations, anti-aliasing, and hidden-point removal. In addition, an efficient real-time implementation on the GPU was carried out.