A Panoramic Walkthrough System with Occlusion Culling

Abstract

The interactive and high quality rendering of very complex scenes in a virtual environment is very difficult if not impossible to achieve. This research extends our previous EGVE paper that presents a panoramic walkthrough system, allowing the user to move inside the datasets on a pre-defined track and look around interactively in both the horizontal and vertical directions. The interactivity is achieved by using Image-Based Rendering ideas to pre-compute the partial renderings for the reference viewpoints chosen on the track and store them on the server so that the client can retrieve and reconstruct novel views using the appropriate information. In this paper, we present simple and efficient methods to partition the scene into depth layers to avoid occlusion and dis-occlusion problems. We also present a novel track-dependent occlusion cullion algorithm to efficiently cull away unnecessary information. The system is tested using several scenes and provides realtime walkthroughs on even the most challenging scenes.