Way‐Finder: guided tours through complex walkthrough models

The exploration of complex walkthrough models is often a difficult task due to the presence of densely occluded regions which pose a serious challenge to online navigation. In this paper we address the problem of algorithmic generation of exploration paths for complex walkthrough models. We present a characterization of suitable properties for camera paths and we discuss an efficient algorithm for computing them with little or no user intervention. Our approach is based on identifying the free‐space structure of the scene (represented by a cell and portal graph) and an entropy‐based measure of the relevance of a view‐point. This metric is key for deciding which cells have to be visited and for computing critical way‐points inside each cell. Several results on different model categories are presented and discussed.

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