Visibility Preprocessing with Occluder Fusion for Urban Walkthroughs

Abstract

This paper describes a new algorithm that employs image-based rendering for fast occlusion culling in complex urban environments. It exploits graphics hardware to render and automatically combine a relatively large set of occluders. The algorithm is fast to calculate and therefore also useful for scenes of moderate complexity and walkthroughs with over 20 frames per second. Occlusion is calculated dynamically and does not rely on any visibility precalculation or occluder preselection. Speed-ups of one order of magnitude can be obtained.

More Info

Funding: Austrian Science Foundation  under contract no. P-13867-INF 
Contact: Peter Wonka, Michael Wimmer, Dieter Schmalstieg
Keywords: Visibility preprocessing, occlusion culling, visibility culling, occluder fusion, real-time rendering, urban walkthroughs, urban environments

Videos

	Video 1: This video shows an overview of our 8 million polygon model of a part of Vienna. (1.2MB)
	Video 2: This video shows the view cells along a path through the city. View cells are shown in red. (4MB)
	Video 3: This video shows the view cells along a path through the city. For each view cell the cull map is shown on the left. (1.7MB)
	Video 4: This video shows the visibility from 2 points (view cells). For the two points views on the ground (2m height) and views high above are recorded to demonstrate the quality of the visibility calculation.  (6.9MB)
	Video 5: This video shows a walkthrough in the city. (4.6MB)

Images