Rendering complex scenes using spatial subdivision and textured LOD meshes

Abstract

We present a hybrid rendering scheme that explores the locality of visibility at the cost of extra storage and prefetching, and makes a tradeoff between image quality and rendering efficiency by using textured level-of-detail (LOD) meshes. The space is first subdivided into cells. For each cell, inside objects are rendered as normal while outside objects are rendered as textured LOD meshes using projective texture mapping. The textured LOD meshes are object based and derived from the original meshes based on the captured depth images viewed at the centers of the cell and its adjacent cells. With such a textured LOD mesh, problems commonly found in image-based rendering, such as the hole problem due to occlusion among objects and the gap problems due to resolution mismatch, can be avoided. The size of holes due to self-occlusion is constrained to be within a user-specified tolerance. Several scenes with millions of polygons have been tested and higher than 200 FPS has been achieved with a little loss of image quality. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.