Adaptive global visibility sampling

Abstract

In this paper we propose a global visibility algorithm which computes from-region visibility for all view cells simultaneously in a progressive manner. We cast rays to sample visibility interactions and use the information carried by a ray for all view cells it intersects. The main contribution of the paper is a set of adaptive sampling strategies based on ray mutations that exploit the spatial coherence of visibility. Our method achieves more than an order of magnitude speedup compared to per-view cell sampling. This provides a practical solution to visibility preprocessing and also enables a new type of interactive visibility analysis application, where it is possible to quickly inspect and modify a coarse global visibility solution that is constantly refined.

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Index Terms

• Computing methodologies

  • Computer graphics

    • Image manipulation

    • Rendering

      • Visibility