From Megapixels to Megavoxels: Scientific Visualization on Large Tiled Displays

EECS Colloquium

Featuring Joerg Meyer, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Biomedical Engineering
The Henry Samueli School of Engineering
UC Irvine

Location:  McDonnell Douglas Auditorium
Free and open to the public

Abstract:
High-resolution, 3-D scans of objects are used in medical diagnostics to detect tumors, reveal injuries or display brain activity.  3-D tomographic scans can also be used, for instance, in civil engineering and material sciences to look for microscopic cracks in concrete or other materials.  These applications have in common that they produce large-scale volumetric data sets that need to be rendered on large displays within a reasonable amount of time, preferably in real-time. Scientists want to be able to display an object from varying angles or change its optical properties so that parts of the object become transparent, revealing their inside.  All of these constraints provide challenges for the real-time rendering engine. Algorithms that compute the images must process enormous amounts of data, which must be structured so that they can be easily distributed to a cluster of rendering nodes. We use HIPerWall, a 200 megapixel tiled display wall at Calit2, to display both 2- and 3-D images in nearly real time. What used to be megapixels now became megavoxels.

Biography:
Joerg Meyer, Ph.D., is an assistant professor with a shared appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Department of Biomedical Engineering in The Henry Samueli School of Engineering at the University of California, Irvine.  He joined UC Irvine in 2002. Meyer is also affiliated with the Center of GRAVITY (Graphics, Visualization and Imaging Technology) in the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2).  His research interests include large-scale scientific visualization, biomedical imaging, digital image processing, interactive rendering and virtual reality.

Please visit the EECS Colloquium website for a complete list of lectures.