Voxelization using FPGAs

Abstract

Voxelization is critical for volume modeling of geometric shapes and graphics primitives. Hardware voxelization has been the dream of researchers for more than a decade now. Traditional software solutions for voxelization are extremely compute intensive and cannot be implemented easily in hardware. Earlier proposals to extend conventional rasterization hardware systems have not delivered the desirable results. The objectives of this work are two fold: to achieve fast voxelization and the algorithm should be implemented easily. To achieve these objectives, we embark on a FPGA based prototype implementation and demonstrate that it is very easy to implement fast voxelization. An FPGA-based hardware implementation of a 3D scan conversion unit is presented. It is based on the 3D scan conversion of line segments. This functionality is extended to scan-convert triangles, and finally tetrahedra. VHDL code and simulation plots are also shown.