Visibility Computation on Reconfigurable Meshes

Visibility problems are investigated using reconngurable meshes. A set of algorithms are proposed on the architecture for visibility computation in two and three dimensions. We show that visibility of a total of n disjoint edges in the plane can be computed in O(1) time on an n n mesh. The result is optimal in the word model of VLSI. For the case that the edges are not disjoint, the problem is shown to be solvable in O(1) time by using a mesh of slightly larger size or in slightly more time on an n n mesh. We also present hidden line and surface elimination algorithms that run on an n n n mesh for a set of disjoint triangles in 3-space containing a total of n vertices in O(1) time and O(k) time, respectively, where 0 k < n is an input-dependent constant.