Volume rendering - implementing refined bounding box

Hi,
I’m having some difficulty with this scenario. I have size 1 cube where the vertices = colour = texture coordinates. I render the front faces of the cube to an FBO texture and pass that texture to a shader. Then I render the front faces of the cube again using the following shader:

  
varying vec4 pos;
void main()
{
	gl_TexCoord[0] = gl_MultiTexCoord0;
	gl_Position = ftransform();
	pos = gl_Position;
} 

uniform sampler2D frontFace;
varying vec4 pos;
void main()
{
	vec2 texc = ((pos.xy / pos.w) + 1.0) / 2.0; // find the right place to lookup in the backside buffer, NDCS divide by w
	vec3 coord1= texture2D(frontFace, texc).xyz;
	vec3 coord2= gl_TexCoord[0].stp;
	gl_FragColor = vec4((coord1-coord2)*1000,1);
}

What I notice is that there’s a small difference between the texture coordinates that openGL computes and the ones I’m looking up in the texture rendered earlier. I guess it can be attributed to linear interpolation in the 2D texture. Or I may be making a mistake in my implementation. In the end, the rendering quality is worse when looking up the coordinates in a texture vs. using the cube’s texture coordinates. Any help on how I can look up the right coordinates in the pre-rendered texture?

Background on what I’m trying to do:
I’m trying to speed up volume rendering by skipping empty spaces. I’m basing it on techniques described in this paper:
http://www.cescg.org/CESCG-2005/papers/VRVis-Scharsach-Henning.pdf
where basically the front/back faces you render form a tighter bounding box around the volume. So I do 3 passes, first two render front/back faces, the last pass renders an overall bounding box front faces and uses the shader which does the raycasting.

Thank you for any help.

Is your texture an RGBA (4 unsigned bytes) ?

Then your x,y,z coordinates are being squished into the resolution of an unsigned byte. (0 - 255)
Whereas your other coordinate calculations get to remain floats through the whole process.

Good point. It is stored internally as RGB. I tried GL_RGB16 and that didn’t work, so I used GL_RGBA16F_ARB for the FBO. Works great now. Thanks for your help.