The visibility skeleton: a powerful and efficient multi-purpose global visibility tool

Many problems in computer graphics and computer vision require accurate global visibility information. Previous approaches have typically been complicated to implement and numerically unstable, and often too expensive in storage or computation. The Visibility Skeleton is a new powerful utility which can efficiently and accurately answer visibility queries for the entire scene. The Visibility Skeleton is a multi-purpose tool, which can solve numerous different problems. A simple construction algorithm is presented which only requires the use of well known computer graphics algorithmic components such as ray-casting and line/plane intersections. We provide an exhaustive catalogue of visual events which completely encode all possible visibility changes of a polygonal scene into a graph structure. The nodes of the graph are extremal stabbing lines, and the arcs are critical line swaths. Our implementation demonstrates the construction of the Visibility Skeleton for scenes of over a thousa...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: SIGGRAPH
• Authors: Frédo Durand, George Drettakis, Claude Puech
• Keywords: Accurate Global Visibility, Computer Graphics, Possible Visibility Changes, SIGGRAPH 1997, Visibility Skeleton