Visibility Preprocessing for Complex 3d Scenes Using Hardware-visibility Queries

In cases of densely occluded urban scenes, it is effective to determine the visibility of scenes, since only small parts of the scene are visible from a given cell. In this paper, we introduce a new visibility preprocessing method that efficiently computes potentially visible objects for volumetric cells. The proposed method deals with general 3D polygonal models and invisible objects jointly blocked by multiple occluders. The proposed approach decomposes volume visibility into a set of point visibilities, and then computes point visibility using hardwarevisibility queries. We carry out experiments on various large-scale scenes, and show the performance of our algorithm. Our performance analysis approach estimates the exact solution of volume visibility. From differences between the estimated solution and the proposed algorithm’s solution, we show our algorithm seeks a tight overestimate of the potentially visible set (PVS).