Adaptive Global Visibility Sampling

Jiri Bittner Oliver Mattausch Peter Wonka Vlastimil Havran Michael Wimmer
Czech Technical University in Prague Vienna University of Technology Arizona State University Czech Technical University in Prague Vienna University of Technology

SIGGRAPH 2009 - New Orleans

In this paper we propose a global visibility algorithm which computes from-region visibility for all view cells simultaneously in a progressive manner. We cast rays to sample visibility interactions and use the information carried by a ray for all view cells it intersects. The main contribution of the paper is a set of adaptive sampling strategies based on ray mutations that exploit the spatial coherence of visibility. Our method achieves more than an order of magnitude speedup compared to per-view cell sampling. This provides a practical solution to visibility preprocessing and also enables a new type of interactive visibility analysis application, where it is possible to quickly inspect and modify a coarse global visibility solution that is constantly refined.


Paper page at Vienna University of Technology
Paper preprint.
Bibtex Entry
@article\{BITTNER-2009-AGVS,
  title =      "Adaptive Global Visibility Sampling",
  author =     "Jiri Bittner and Oliver Mattausch and Peter Wonka and Vlastimil Havran and Michael Wimmer",
  year =       "2009",
  abstract =   "In this paper we propose a global visibility algorithm which computes from-region visibility for all view cells simultaneously in a
progressive manner. We cast rays to sample visibility interactions and
use the information carried by a ray for all view cells it
intersects. The main contribution of the paper is a set of adaptive
sampling strategies based on ray mutations that exploit the spatial
coherence of visibility. Our method achieves more than an order of
magnitude speedup compared to per-view cell sampling. This provides a
practical solution to visibility preprocessing and also enables a new
type of interactive visibility analysis application, where it is
possible to quickly inspect and modify a coarse global visibility
solution that is constantly refined.",
  pages =      "94:1-94:10",
  month =      aug,
  issn =       "0730-0301",
  journal =    "ACM Transactions on Graphics",
  event =      "ACM SIGGRAPH 2009",
  note =       "Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 2009",
  number =     "3",
  volume =     "28",
  location =   "New Orleans, USA",
  keywords =   "visibility, visibility sampling, occlusion culling, PVS",
  URL =        "http://www.cgg.cvut.cz/members/bittner/publications/agvs/",
}
The main video for the paper briefly illustrates the principle of the method and shows its potential application.
Video showing a comparison with the reference method (REF) which uses uniform random sampling.
Video showing a comparison with the GVS method [Wonka et al. SIGGRAPH 2006].
Video illustrating the possibility of scene editing and incremental update of the visibility solution with AGVS.
Video showing the walkthrough of the vienna scene using the PVSs computed by AGVS.