HIERARCHICAL VISIBILITY STRUCTURES FOR SYNTHESIS DYNAMIC-SCENE IMAGES

Abstract

The radiosity method is mostly used as a global illumination model for diffuse environments. However its computation cost is too great for many applications. Specifically in dynamic environmants, where scenes are subject to modifications, existing static algorithms are not fast enough to provide a new global solution for interactive applications. This paper presents two hierarchical data structures to speedup the radiosity recomputation for a modified scene. The first data structure is the Hierarchical Link Structure that allows for easy determination of links which are potentially to be changed by scene updating. The second data structure is the Hierarchical Visibility Buffer that provides efficient visibility estimations in computing energy exchanges. Several experimental results are reported, which shows that the proposed approach is fast and effective. CR Categories: I.3.7[Computer Graphics]: Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism-Radiosity; I.3.6[Computer Graphics]: Methodology and Techniques-Graphics data structures and data types, Interaction techniques