Exploiting Hardware-Accelerated Occlusion Queries for Visibility Culling

Abstract

Visibility culling techniques have been studied extensively in computer graphics for interactive walkthrough applications in recent years. In this paper, a visibility culling approach by exploiting hardware-accelerated occlusion query is proposed. Organizing the regular grid representation of input scene as an octree-like hierarchy, a 2-tier view frustum culling algorithm is to efficiently cull away nodes invisible from a given viewpoint. Employing the eye-siding number of nodes, we can quickly enumerate an occlusion front-to-back order and effectively maximize the number of parallelizable occlusion queries for nodes while traversing the hierarchy. As experimental results show, our approach improves the overall performance in the test walkthrough.