Exploiting temporally coherent visibility for accelerated walkthroughs

This paper is concerned with the efficient generation of graphic images by exploiting temporally coherent visibility to minimize polygon flow. The basic idea is to manage the visible polygon set (VPS) somewhat loosely, thereby reducing the computational effort considerably while maintaining the quality of the rendered image at a reasonably high level. Our method executes the culling-prediction-interpolation-rendering loop repeatedly, in an intelligent fashion. It calculates the exact visible polygons for two frames: one for the current view and the other for the predicted view after some frames. The in-between frames can be rendered from those polygons that belong to the two extreme frames. Furthermore, our algorithm regulates the frame rate to the desired target frame rate by controlling the number of the in-between frames. Because our algorithm needs to calculate the visible polygons for the key frames, any other culling algorithms can be easily used with it in this part. In navigation applications including walkthrough, our algorithm causes greatly enhanced performance of the culling process.