Two-Level Transfer Functions Using t-SNE for Data Segmentation in Direct Volume Rendering

The transfer function (TF) design is crucial for enhancing the visualization quality and understanding of volume data in volume rendering. Recent research has proposed various multidimensional TFs to utilize diverse attributes extracted from volume data for controlling individual voxel rendering. Although multidimensional TFs enhance the ability to segregate data, manipulating various attributes for the rendering is cumbersome. In contrast, low-dimensional TFs are more beneficial as they are easier to manage, but separating volume data during rendering is problematic. This paper proposes a novel approach, a two-level transfer function, for rendering volume data by reducing TF dimensions. The proposed technique involves extracting multidimensional TF attributes from volume data and applying t-Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) to the TF attributes for dimensionality reduction. The two-level transfer function combines the classical 2D TF and t-SNE TF in the conventional direct volume rendering pipeline. The proposed approach is evaluated by comparing segments in t-SNE TF and rendering images using various volume datasets. The results of this study demonstrate that the proposed approach can effectively allow us to manipulate multidimensional attributes easily while maintaining high visualization quality in volume rendering.