Date: Thu, 16 Jan 1997 03:31:56 GMT Server: NCSA/1.4.2 Content-type: text/html Last-modified: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 20:41:46 GMT Content-length: 2024
j ward shade pages -- Walkthru

Hierarchical Image Caching for Accelerated
Walkthroughs of Complex Environments

We present a new method that utilizes path coherence to accelerate walkthroughs of geometrically complex static scenes. As a preprocessing step, our method constructs a BSP-tree that hierarchically partitions the geometric primitives in the scene. In the course of a walkthrough, images of nodes at various levels of the hierarchy are cached for reuse in subsequent frames. A cached image is reused by texture-mapping it onto a single quadrilateral that is drawn instead of the geometry contained in the corresponding node. Visual artifacts are kept under control by using an error metric that quantifies the discrepancy between the appearance of the geometry contained in a node and the cached image. The new method is shown to achieve speedups of an order of magnitude for walkthroughs of a complex outdoor scene, with little or no loss in rendering quality.

Paper with High Resolution Figures 494K Adobe Acrobat PDF
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Paper with Low Resolution Figures 285K Compressed Postscript