Implicit Occluders

  • Authors:

  • Sinesio Pesco;Peter Lindstrom;Valerio Pascucci;Claudio T. Silva

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Utah;University of Utah;University of Utah;University of Utah

  • Venue:
  • VV '04 Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE Symposium on Volume Visualization and Graphics
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

In this paper we propose a novel visibility-culling technique for optimizing the computation and rendering of opaque isosurfaces. Given a continuous scalar field f(x) over a domain D and an iso-value w, our technique exploits the continuity of f to determine conservative visibility bounds implicitly, i.e., without the need for actually computing the isosurface f^{ - 1} (w). We generate Implicit Occluders based on the change in sign of f*(x) = f(x) - w, from positive to negative (or vice versa) in the neighborhood of the isosurface.Consider, for example, the sign of f* along a ray r cast from the current viewpoint.The first change in sign of f* within D must contain an intersection of r with the isosurface.Any additional intersection of the isosurface with r is not visible. Implicit Occluders constitute a general concept that can be exploited algorithmically in different ways depending on the framework adopted for visibility computations.In this paper, we proposea simple from-point approach that exploits well-known hardware occlusion queries.