Visible Nearest Neighbor Queries

We introduce the visible k nearest neighbor (VkNN) query, which finds the k nearest objects that are visible to a query point. We also propose an algorithm to efficiently process the VkNN query. We compute the visible neighbors incrementally as we enlarge the search space. Our algorithm dramatically reduces the search cost compared to existing methods that require the computation of the visibility of all objects in advance. With extensive experiments, we show that our algorithm to process the VkNN query outperform the existing algorithms significantly.