Visibility algorithms for walkthrough and related applications have grown into a significant area, spurred by the growth in the complexity of models and the need for highly interactive ways of navigating them. In this survey, we review the fundamental issues in visibility and conduct an overview of the visibility culling techniques developed in the last decade. The taxonomy we use distinguishes between point-based and from-region methods. Point-based methods are further subdivided into object and image-precision techniques, while from-region approaches can take advantage of the cell-and-portal structure of architectural environments or handle generic scenes.

We propose a novel conservative visibility culling technique based on the Prioritized-Layered Projection (PLP) algorithm. PLP is a time-critical rendering technique that computes, for a given viewpoint, a partially correct image by rendering only a subset of the geometric primitives, those that PLP determines to be mostly likely visible. Our new algorithm builds on PLP and provides an efficient way of finding the remaining visible primitives. We do this by adding a second phase to PLP which uses image-space techniques for determining the visibility status of the remaining geometry. Another contribution of our work is to show how to efficiently implement such image-space visibility queries using currently available OpenGL hardware and extensions. We report on the implementation of our techniques on several graphics architectures, analyze their complexity, and discuss a possible hardware extension that has the potential to further increase performance. CR Categories: I.3.3 [Computer Gra...

this paper, we present an algorithm for general visibility queries. This algorithm exploits several OpenGL features in order to obtain faster results for large polygonal models. To show the applicability of our algorithm -- in terms of graphics performance -- on low-end graphics workstations, we performed all measurements on an SGI O2 /R10000 and an SGI Octane/MXE graphics workstation. Furthermore, we propose an extension to the OpenGL rendering pipeline to add features for improved general occlusion culling.

Collision detection is a vital task in almost all forms of computer animation and physical simulation. It is also one of the most computationally expensive, and therefore a frequent impediment to efficient implementation of real-time graphics applications. We describe how graphics hardware can be used as a geometric co-processor to carry out the bulk of the computation involved with collision detection. Hardware frame buffer operations are used to implement a ray-casting algorithm which detects static interference between solid polyhedral objects. The algorithm is linear in both the number of objects and number of polygons in the models. It also requires no preprocessing or special data structures.

Prioritized-Layered Projection (PLP) is a technique for fast rendering of high depth complexity scenes. It works by estimating the visible polygons of a scene from a given viewpoint incrementally, one primitive at a time. It is not a conservative technique, instead PLP is suitable for the computation of partially correct images for use as part of time-critical rendering systems. From a very high level, PLP amounts to a modification of a simple view-frustum culling algorithm, however, it requires the computation of a special occupancy-based tessellation, and the assignment to each cell of the tessellation a solidity value, which is used to compute a special ordering on how primitives get projected. In this paper, we detail the PLP algorithm, its main components and implementation. We also provide experimental evidence of its performance, including results on two types of spatial tessellation (using octree- and Delaunay-based tessellations), and several datasets. We also discu...

. Virtual Medicine is an emerging and challenging field in Computer Graphics. Numerous visualization methods are used to model and render data of different modalities. In this paper, we present a new endoscopy system for virtual medicine. The main purpose of this system is to provide support for the planning of complicated endoscopic interventions inside of the ventricular system of the human brain. Although, our current focus is on ventricle endoscopy, this system is applicable to other areas as well. In order to achieve interactive framerates on workstations with medium graphics performance, we apply an efficient implementation of a basic algorithm for general visibility queries. Keywords: Virtual Medicine, Virtual Environments, Surgical Assist Systems. 1 Introduction Minimally-invasive neurosurgical procedures are of increasing importance in neurosurgery. In comparison to commonly used surgical techniques, less brain tissue is damaged. Furthermore, minimally-invasive pr...

Abstract not found

Figure 1: A view of a large urban model consisting of 26.8M triangles. In the left image, the parts visible from a region located at the junction of two streets (in green) are colored. In the right image, only the buildings with some visible parts are displayed. From-region visibility culling is considered harder than from-point visibility culling, since it is inherently four-dimensional. We present a conservative occlusion culling method based on factorizing the 4D visibility problem into horizontal and vertical components. The visibility of the two components is solved asymmetrically: the horizontal component is based on a parameterization of the ray space, and the visibility of the vertical component is solved by incrementally merging umbrae. The technique is designed so that the horizontal and vertical operations can be efficiently realized together by modern graphics hardware. Similar to image-based from-point methods, we use an occlusion map to encode visibility; however, the image-space occlusion map is in the ray space rather than in the primal space. Our results show that the culling time and the size of the computed potentially visible set depend on the size of the viewcell. For moderate viewcells, conservative occlusion culling of large urban scenes takes less than a second, and the size of the potentially visible set is only about two times larger than the size of the exact visible set.

Abstract. We present a system for interactive explorations of extraand intracranial blood vessels. Starting with a stack of images from 3D angiography, we use virtual clips to limit the segmentation of the vessel tree to the parts the neuroradiologists are interested in. Furthermore, methods of interactive virtual endoscopy are applied in order to provide an interior view of the blood vessels. CCS Categories: I.3.8 [Application]: Virtual Medicine; I.3.7 [Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism]: Virtual Reality; Keywords: Virtual Environments, 3D Angiography, Virtual Angioscopy, Interventional Neuroradiology, Selective Segmentation, Computer Assisted Diagnosis. 1 Introduction A common procedure in neuroradiology is the examination of extra- and intracranial blood vessels. After the injection of a contrast agent via an endovascular catheter, X-rays are used to acquire 2D projection images of vessels. These images are of high resolution but lack spatial information due to the projecti...

This paper presents a novel algorithm combining view-dependent rendering and conservative occlusion culling for interactive display of complex environments. A vertex hierarchy of the entire scene is decomposed into a cluster hierarchy through a novel clustering and partitioning algorithm. The cluster hierarchy is then used for view-frustum and occlusion culling. Using hardware accelerated occlusion queries and frame-to-frame coherence, a potentially visible set of clusters is computed. An active vertex front and face list is computed from the visible clusters and rendered using vertex arrays. The integrated algorithm has been implemented on a Pentium IV PC with a NVIDIA GeForce 4 graphics card and applied in two complex environments composed of millions of triangles. The resulting system can render these environments at interactive rates with little loss in image quality and minimal popping artifacts. Keywords: Interactive Display, View-Dependent Rendering, Occlusion Culling, Level of Detail, Multiresolution Hierarchies 1