Visibility Algorithms for Real-Time Rendering

Visibility computations are essential operations in computer graphics, which are required for rendering acceleration in the form of visibility culling, as well as for computing realistic lighting. Visibility culling aims to provide output sensitivity by sending only visible primitives to the hardware. Regardless of the rapid development of graphics hardware, it is of crucial importance for many applications like game development or architectural design, as the demands on the hardware regarding scene complexity increase accordingly. Most of the countless proposed algorithms are only usable under certain conditions, or for specific scene configurations. Visibility computations are also required to solve complex lighting interactions in the scene. Hundreds or thousands of visibility queries have to be answered within a fraction of a second in order to reach real-time frame rates. In this book we first give a comprehensive overview of the huge state-of-the-art in the field. Then we propose four novel visibility algorithms that cover several of its aspects, and can be used together for high-quality real-time rendering of general 3D scenes.