Fast Walkthroughs with Image Caches and Ray Casting

Michael Wimmer, Markus Giegl, Dieter Schmalstieg
Fast Walkthroughs with Image Caches and Ray Casting
TR-186-2-98-30, December 1998 [ paper]
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Replaced by Wimmer-1999-FWIa.

Abstract

We present an output-sensitive rendering algorithm for accelerating walkthroughs of large, densely occluded virtual environments using a multi-stage Image Based Rendering Pipeline. In the first stage, objects within a certain distance are rendered using the traditional graphics pipeline, whereas the remaining scene is rendered by a pixel based approach using an Image Cache, horizon estimation to avoid calculating sky pixels, and finally, ray casting. The time complexity of this approach does not depend on the total number of primitives in the scene. We have measured speedups of up to one order of magnitude.

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@techreport{Wimmer-1998-Fas,
  title =      "Fast Walkthroughs with Image Caches and Ray Casting",
  author =     "Michael Wimmer and Markus Giegl and Dieter Schmalstieg",
  year =       "1998",
  abstract =   "We present an output-sensitive rendering algorithm for
               accelerating walkthroughs of large, densely occluded virtual
               environments using a multi-stage Image Based Rendering
               Pipeline. In the first stage, objects within a certain
               distance are rendered using the traditional graphics
               pipeline, whereas the remaining scene is rendered by a pixel
               based approach using an Image Cache, horizon estimation to
               avoid calculating sky pixels, and finally, ray casting. The
               time complexity of this approach does not depend on the
               total number of primitives in the scene. We have measured
               speedups of up to one order of magnitude.",
  address =    "Favoritenstrasse 9-11/186, A-1040 Vienna, Austria",
  institution = "Institute of Computer Graphics and Algorithms, Vienna
               University of Technology",
  note =       "human contact: technical-report@cg.tuwien.ac.at",
  month =      dec,
  number =     "TR-186-2-98-30",
  keywords =   "ray casting, walkthrough, horizon tracing, real-time
               display, panoramic images, image-based rendering,
               visibility, virtual environment",
  URL =        "http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/publications/1998/Wimmer-1998-Fas/",
}