Voreen

Voreen is an open-source volume visualization library and development platform. Through the use of GPU-based volume rendering techniques it allows high frame rates on standard graphics hardware to support interactive volume exploration.

WWW Official Site

History

Voreen was initiated at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Münster, Germany in 2004 and was first released on 11 April 2008 under the
GNU general public license (GPL). Voreen is written in C++ utilizing the Qt framework and using the OpenGL
rendering acceleration API, and is able to achieve high interactive frame rates on consumer graphics hardware. It is platform independent and compiles on Windows and Linux. The source code and documentation, and also pre-compiled binaries for Windows and Linux, are available from its website. Since October 2024, Voreen is developed in an open repository on GitHub. Although it is intended and mostly used for medical applications, any other kind of volume data can be handled, e.g., microscopy, flow data or other simulations.

Concepts

The visualization environment VoreenVE based on that engine is designed for authoring
and performing interactive visualizations of volumetric data. Different visualizations
can be assembled in form of so-called networks via rapid prototyping,
with each network consisting of several processors. Processors perform more or less specialized tasks for the entire rendering process, ranging
from supplying data over raycasting, geometry creation and rendering to image processing. Within the limits
of their respective purposes, the processors can be combined freely with each other,
and thereby granting a great amount of flexibility and providing a uniform way of
handling volume rendering. Authors who need to implement a certain rendering
technique can confine their work basically on the development of new processors,
whereas users who only want to access a certain visualization simply need to employ
the appropriate processors or networks and do not need to care about technical
details.

Features

Visualization

Direct volume rendering, isosurface rendering, maximum intensity projection
Support of different illumination models
Large data visualization
Streamline-based vector field visualization
Multimodal volume rendering
Geometry rendering with support for order-independent transparency
Flexible combination of image processing operators
Visualization of time-varying as well as segmented 3D datasets
Support for 1D and 2D transfer functions/CLUTs
Configurable views for building more complex applications
Plotting
Volume Ensemble visualization

Volume Processing

Isosurface extraction
Efficient basic 3D-image processing for very large volumes
Very large volume analysis
Interactive volume segmentation
Interactive volume registration
Vector field volume processing
Out-of-core processing of spatio-temporal multi-field ensemble datasets
OpenLB integration for flow simulation ensemble generation

Interaction

Configurable application mode for improving usability for domain experts
Axis aligned and arbitrarily aligned clipping planes
Editors for 1D and 2D transfer functions
Inspection of intermediate results
Distance measurements

Data I/O

Support for several volume file formats
High-resolution screenshot and camera animation generation with anti-aliasing
FFmpeg-based video export
Python scripting for offline image processing and visualization
Geometry in/export