D. Cohen-or et al., Conservative visibility and strong occlusion for viewspace partitioning ofdensely occluded scenes, COMPUT GR F, 17(3), 1998, pp. C243
Computing the visibility of out-door scenes is often much harder than of in
-door scenes. A typical urban scene,for example, is densely occluded, and i
t is effective to precompute its visibility space, since fr om a given poin
t only a small fraction of the scene is visible. The difficulty is that alt
hough the majority, of objects are hidden, some parts might be visible at a
distance in an arbitrary location, and it is not clear how to detect them
quickly. In this paper we present a method to partition the viewspace into
cells containing a conservative superset of the visible objects. For a give
n cell the method tests the visibility of all the objects in the scene; For
each object it searches for a strong occluder which guarantees that the ob
ject is not visible from any point within the cell. We show analytically th
at in a densely occluded scene, the vast majority of objects are strongly o
ccluded, and the overhead of using conservative visibility (rather than vis
ibility) is small. These results are further supported by our experimental
results. We also analyze the cost of the method and discuss its effectivene
ss.