View Dependent Sequential Point Trees

Abstract

Sequential point trees provide the state-of-the-art technique for rendering point models, by re-arranging hierarchical points sequentially according to geometric errors running on GPU for fast rendering. This paper presents a view dependent method to augment sequential point trees by embedding the hierarchical tree structures in the sequential list of hierarchical points. By the method, two kinds of indices are constructed to facilitate the points rendering in an order mostly from near to far and from coarse to fine. As a result, invisible points can be culled view-dependently in high efficiency for hardware acceleration, and at the same time, the advantage of sequential point trees could be still fully taken. Therefore, the new method can run much faster than the conventional sequential point trees, and the acceleration can be highly promoted particularly when the objects possess complex occlusion relationship and viewed closely because invisible points would be in a high percentage of the points at finer levels.