View-Dependent Simplification of Arbitrary Polygonal Environments

Abstract

Hierarchical dynamic simplification (HDS) is a new approach to the problem of simplifying arbitrary polygonal environments. HDS operates dynamically, retessellating the scene continuously as the user's viewing position shifts, and adaptively processing the entire database without first decomposing the environment into individual objects. The resulting system allows real-time display of very complex polygonal CAD models consisting of thousands of parts and hundreds of thousands of polygons. HDS supports various preprocessing algorithms and various run-time criteria, providing a general framework for dynamic view-dependent simplification. Briefly, HDS works by clustering vertices together in a hierarchical fashion. The simplification process continuously queries this hierarchy to generate a scene containing only those polygons that are important from the current viewpoint. When the volume of space associated with a vertex cluster occupies less than a user-specified amount of the screen, all vertices within that cluster are collapsed together and degenerate polygons filtered out. HDS maintains an active list of visible polygons for rendering. Since frame-to-frame movements typically involve small changes in viewpoint, and therefore modify the active list by only a few polygons, the method takes advantage of temporal coherence for greater speed.

Open PDF

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2006
Accession Number
ADA446958

Entities

People

  • Carl Erikson
  • David Luebke

Organizations

  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Advanced Electronics
  • Biomedical
  • Space
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Algorithms
  • Applied Computer Science
  • Boundaries
  • Clustering
  • Computer Graphics
  • Computer Science
  • Computer-Aided Design
  • Computers
  • Databases
  • Environment
  • Geometry
  • Graphics
  • Hierarchies
  • Preprocessing
  • Three Dimensional
  • Topology
  • Virtual Reality

Readers

  • Database Systems and Applications
  • Graph Algorithms and Convex Optimization.
  • Image Processing and Computer Vision.

Technology Areas

  • Space