An optimal viewpoint selection method for volume rendering based on shuffled frog leaping algorithm is presented.Utilizing the opacity,luminance and structure features of the projected views of three-dimensional volume dates,a viewpoint evaluation function is constructed to identify the importance of voxels and the structural information within the volume data.Combined with this function,shuffled frog leaping algorithm is used to optimize the computation process of the optimal viewpoint selection,so as to acquire a global optimal viewpoint or a series of optimal viewpoints.The experimental results show this method can not only focus on important structural information and region of interest more effectively,but also improve the convergence rate and accuracy,while having a standout performance to select a global optimal viewpoint.Thus it can be used to guide the volume rendering for large scale volume datasets.