Rendering speed is a key technology of volume rendering. In order to accelerate rendering process

we present a novel imaging acceleration approach based on Intel SIMD and segmentation technologies

which obtain significant speedup without degrading image quality. Only applying Intel SIMD techniques

we can obtain the rendering speed 2～5 times faster than brute force ray casting. SIMD techniques are combined with threshold segmentation to skip large empty samplings

and the rendering speed is further more improved. Because the time of threshold segmenting a large data set is very short

the algorithm can quickly display the rendered image once the threshold values are changed. Experiments have been done on a single processor P4/1.6G PC

and it is 10 more times faster than brute force ray casting and about 1 to 3 frames per second is obtained with the image size 512×512. Our algorithm has some advantages that rendering speed can be greatly accelerated without any specialized purpose hardware and time-consuming preprocessing

and images quality is very high.