A Succinct 3D Visibility Skeleton

The 3D visibility skeleton is a data structure that encodes the global visibility information of a set of 3D objects. While it is useful in answering global visibility queries, its large size often limits its practical use. In this paper, we address this issue by proposing a subset of the visibility skeleton, which is empirically about 25% to 50% of the whole set. We show that the rest of the data structure can be recovered from the subset as needed, partially or completely. The running time complexity, which we analyze in terms of output size, is efficient. We also prove that the subset is minimal in the sense that the complexity bound ceases to hold if the subset is restricted further.

[1]  David G. Kirkpatrick,et al.  Determining the Separation of Preprocessed Polyhedra - A Unified Approach , 1990, ICALP.

[2]  Peter Shirley,et al.  Single Sample Soft Shadows , 2008 .

[3]  J. Koenderink,et al.  The singularities of the visual mapping , 1976, Biological Cybernetics.

[4]  Frédo Durand,et al.  The visibility skeleton: a powerful and efficient multi-purpose global visibility tool , 1997, SIGGRAPH.

[5]  Zhengrong Liang,et al.  Reliable Path for Virtual Endoscopy: Ensuring Complete Examination of Human Organs , 2001, IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph..

[6]  Hazel Everett,et al.  Transversals to Line Segments in Three-Dimensional Space , 2005, Discret. Comput. Geom..

[7]  Tomas Akenine-Möller,et al.  Approximate Soft Shadows on Arbitrary Surfaces using Penumbra Wedges , 2002, Rendering Techniques.

[8]  George Drettakis,et al.  Robust epsilon visibility , 2002, ACM Trans. Graph..

[9]  Thomas Funkhouser,et al.  A beam tracing method for interactive architectural acoustics. , 2004, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[10]  Micha Sharir,et al.  Ray Shooting amidst Convex Polyhedra and Polyhedral Terrains in Three Dimensions , 1996, SIAM J. Comput..

[11]  Marco Pellegrini,et al.  Ray shooting on triangles in 3-space , 1993, Algorithmica.

[12]  Joseph O'Rourke,et al.  Computational Geometry in C. , 1995 .

[13]  Xavier Goaoc,et al.  Computing Direct Shadows Cast by Convex Polyhedra , 2009 .

[14]  Frédo Durand,et al.  The 3D visibility complex , 2002, TOGS.

[15]  Michel Pocchiola,et al.  The visibility complex , 1993, SCG '93.

[16]  François X. Sillion,et al.  A Survey of Real‐time Soft Shadows Algorithms , 2003, Comput. Graph. Forum.

[17]  Xavier Goaoc,et al.  Topological changes in the apparent contour of convex sets , 2008 .

[18]  Frédo Durand,et al.  Fast and accurate hierarchical radiosity using global visibility , 1999, TOGS.

[19]  Hazel Everett,et al.  On the Size of the 3D Visibility Skeleton: Experimental Results , 2008, ESA.

[20]  F. Durand Visibilité tridimensionnelle : étude analytique et apllications , 1999 .

[21]  Hazel Everett,et al.  Lines and Free Line Segments Tangent to Arbitrary Three-Dimensional Convex Polyhedra , 2007, SIAM J. Comput..

[22]  Michael Wimmer,et al.  Visibility Preprocessing with Occluder Fusion for Urban Walkthroughs , 2000, Rendering Techniques.

[23]  Joseph O'Rourke,et al.  Computational geometry in C (2nd ed.) , 1998 .

[24]  Marc Glisse,et al.  Combinatoire des droites et segments pour la visibilité 3D. (Combinatorics of lines and segments for 3D visibility) , 2007 .