Visibility culling for interactive dynamic scenes

  • Authors:
  • George Baciu;Ki-Wan Kwok

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Kowloon, Hong Kong;Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Kowloon, Hong Kong

  • Venue:
  • Integrated image and graphics technologies
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Virtual environments are rapidly growing in size and complexity. At the same time, there is a strong commercial need for rendering larger and larger scenes at interactive rates. This leads to two basic enhancements, one by increasing the performance and the size of memory in hardware in order to support large scene rendering and another in software by designing more efficient visibility algorithms. Visibility culling methods manage complexity by sending only the potentially visible primitives into the rendering pipeline. At present, occlusion culling algorithms do not handle well scenes with dynamic objects. One of the main difficulties is handling changes to the object hierarchies since the visibility information changes continuously. In this chapter, we present a fast from-region occlusion culling method that is able to compute the potential visible sets online for large dynamic outdoor scenes. The method uses an occlusion map on a dual ray-space in order to encode visibility with respect to a view cell. It utilizes new features of the advanced graphics hardware architecture to construct and maintain occlusion maps.