Reconstruction Issues in Volume Visualization

Although volume visualization has already grown out of its infancy, the most commonly used reconstruction techniques are still trilinear interpolation for function reconstruction and central differences (most often in conjunction with trilinear interpolation) for gradient reconstruction. Nevertheless, quite some research in the last few years was devoted to improve this situation. This paper surveys the more important methods, emphasizing selected work in function and gradient reconstruction, and gives an overview over the rather new development of exploiting second-order derivatives for volume visualization purposes.