Exploiting coherence in hierarchical visibility algorithms

We present a series of simple improvements that make use of temporal and spatial coherence in the scope of hierarchical visibility algorithms. The hierarchy updating avoids visibility tests of certain interior nodes of the hierarchy. The visibility propagation algorithm reuses information about visibility of neighbouring spatial regions. Finally, the conservative hierarchy updating avoids visibility tests of the hierarchy nodes that are expected to remain visible. We evaluate the presented methods in the context of hierarchical visibility culling using occlusion trees. Copyright # 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.