WALKTHROUGHS OF COMPLEX ENVIRONMENTS USING IMAGE-BASED SIMPLIFICATION

We present an image-based technique to accelerate the navigation in co mplex static environments. We perform an image-space simplification of each sample of the scene taken at a particular viewpoint and dynamica lly combine these simplified samples to produce images for arbitrary v iewpoints. Since the scene is converted into a bounded complexity repr esentation in the image space, with the base images rendered beforehan d, the rendering speed is relatively insensitive to the complexity of the scene. The proposed method correctly simulates the kinetic depth e ffect (parallax), occlusion, and can resolve the missing visibility in formation. This paper describes a suitable representation for the samp les, a specific technique for simplifying them, and different morphing methods for combining the sample information to reconstruct the scene . We use hardware texture mapping to implement the image-space warping and hardware affine transformations to compute the view-dependent war ping function. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.