Adaptive level of detail with occlusion culling

Many techniques have been developed in order to accelerate the visualization of large triangle meshes. Level of Detail techniques can be used to create view-dependent approximations of wide range scenes with low occlusion, such as landscapes. For highly occluded scenes there exist many occlusion culling techniques, which discard occluded parts of the scene before rendering. This can drastically speed up the visualization of such scenes but will not improve rendering of wide non-occluded scenes. In this paper we will combine both acceleration methods. We present a new approach, which combines the benefits of Level of Detail rendering and of Occlusion Culling, in order to minimize their drawbacks. The technique adds occlusion as a view-dependence criterion for Level of Detail rendering and is even able to optimize the refinement of self occluding meshes.