Real-Time Occlusion Culling With A Lazy Occlusion Grid

Heinrich Hey, Robert F. Tobler, Werner Purgathofer
Real-Time Occlusion Culling With A Lazy Occlusion Grid
TR-186-2-01-02, January 2001 [ paper]
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Abstract

We present a new conservative image-based occlusion culling method to increase the speed of hardware accelerated rendering of very complex general scenes which may consist of millions of polygons without time-expensive preprocessing. The method is based on a low-resolution grid upon a conventional z-buffer or an occlusion-buffer. This grid is updated in a lazy manner which reduces the number of expensive occlusion queries at pixel-level significantly compared to a busy update. It allows fast decisions if an object is occluded or potentially visible. The grid is used together with a bounding volume hierarchy that is traversed in a front to back order and which allows to cull large parts of the scene at once. We show that the method works efficiently on today´s available hardware and we compare lazy and busy updates.

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@techreport{Hey-2001-ReaX,
  title =      "Real-Time Occlusion Culling With A Lazy Occlusion Grid",
  author =     "Heinrich Hey and Robert F. Tobler and Werner Purgathofer",
  year =       "2001",
  abstract =   "We present a new conservative image-based occlusion culling
               method to increase the speed of hardware accelerated
               rendering of very complex general scenes which may consist
               of millions of polygons without time-expensive
               preprocessing. The method is based on a low-resolution grid
               upon a conventional z-buffer or an occlusion-buffer. This
               grid is updated in a lazy manner which reduces the number of
               expensive occlusion queries at pixel-level significantly
               compared to a busy update. It allows fast decisions if an
               object is occluded or potentially visible. The grid is used
               together with a bounding volume hierarchy that is traversed
               in a front to back order and which allows to cull large
               parts of the scene at once. We show that the method works
               efficiently on today´s available hardware and we compare
               lazy and busy updates.",
  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 =      jan,
  number =     "TR-186-2-01-02",
  keywords =   "hardware accelerated rendering, real-time rendering,
               visibility, occlusion culling",
  URL =        "http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/publications/2001/Hey-2001-ReaX/",
}