Occlusion-Free Animation of Driving Routes for Car Navigation Systems

Abstract

This paper presents a computational method for occlusion-free animation of geographical landmarks and its application to a new car navigation system in which driving routes of interest are always visible. This is achieved by animating surperspective projection images where geographical landmarks such as mountain tops and roads are projected as seen from different viewpoints. The proposed approach consists of: extracting geographical landmarks automatically from the 3D terrain surface; deforming the 3D terrain surface using 2D screen constraints imposed on the landmarks; and retaining temporal coherence in the animation by controlling the deformation of the terrain surface. Several occlusion-free route animations using real data of a mountain area are created to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.