Synthesising Light Field Volume Visualisations Using Image Warping in Real-Time

We extend our prior research on light field view synthesis for volume data presented in the conference proceedings of VISIGRAPP 2019 [13]. In that prior research, we identified the best Convolutional Neural Network, depth heuristic, and image warping technique to employ in our light field synthesis method. Our research demonstrated that applying backward image warping using a depth map estimated during volume rendering followed by a Convolutional Neural Network produced high quality results. In this body of work, we further address the generalisation of Convolutional Neural Network applied to different volumes and transfer functions from those trained upon. We show that the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) fails to generalise on a large dataset of head magnetic resonance images. Additionally, we speed up our implementation to enable better timing comparisons while remaining functionally equivalent to our previous method. This produces a real-time application of light field synthesis for volume data and the results are of high quality for low-baseline light fields.