Direct volume rendering using ray-casting is widely used in practice. By using GPUs and applying acceleration techniques as empty space skipping, high frame rates are possible on modern hardware. This enables performance-critical use-cases such as virtual reality volume rendering. The currently fastest known technique uses volumetric distance maps to skip empty sections of the volume during ray-casting but requires the distance map to be updated per transfer function change. In this paper, we demonstrate a technique for subdividing the volume intensity range into partitions and deriving what we call partitioned distance maps. These can be used to accelerate the distance map computation for a newly changed transfer function by a factor up to 30. This allows the currently fastest known empty space skipping approach to be used while maintaining high frame rates even when the transfer function is changed frequently.

Android is an open software platform for mobile devices with a large market share in the smart phone sector. The openness of the system as well as its wide adoption lead to an increasing amount of malware developed for this platform. ANANAS is an expandable and modular framework for analyzing Android applications. It takes care of common needs for dynamic malware analysis and provides an interface for the development of plugins. Adaptability and expandability have been main design goals during the development process. An abstraction layer for simple user interaction and phone event simulation is also part of the framework. It allows an analyst to script the required user simulation or phone events on demand or adjust the simulation to his needs. Six plugins have been developed for ANANAS. They represent well known techniques for malware analysis, such as system call hooking and network traffic analysis. The focus clearly lies on dynamic analysis, as five of the six plugins are dynamic analysis methods.