Volume fusion: a unified framework for multi-scale dynamic and heterogeneous scenes

This work presents a novel unified solution --- a volume fusion framework for 3D modeling, interaction, and visualization applications with complex volumetric scenes composed of any type of conventional and unconventional object representations. The process of volume fusion includes scene expression and scene evaluation. A volume scene evaluation based on slice sweeping approach is employed to provide a general computational framework that extracts volumetric information of the scene expression and then fuse them by specified fusion functions. The key issues of volume fusion are scene tree design and fusion function design. Through the unified framework, different tree structures and fusion functions may result in different outputs (i.e., applications) after scene evaluation. Two case studies, volume modeling and volumetric collision detection, using volume fusion framework will be discussed in detail, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness, flexibility and generality of our volume fusion algorithms for 3D interactive volume applications.