Differential Point Rendering

Abstract

We present a novel point rendering primitive, called Differential Point (DP), that captures the local differential geometry in the vicinity of a sampled point. This is a more general point representation that, for the cost of a few additional bytes, packs much more information per point than the traditional point-based models. This information is used to efficiently render the surface as a collection of local neighborhoods. The advantages to this representation are manyfold: (1) it delivers a significant reduction in the number of point primitives that represent a surface (2) it achieves robust hardware accelerated per-pixel shading even with no connectivity information (3) it offers a novel point-based simplification technique that has a convenient and intuitive interface for the user to efficiently resolve the speed versus quality tradeoff. The number of primitives being equal, DPs produce a much better quality of rendering than a pure splatbased approach. Visual appearances being similar, DPs are about two times faster and require about 75% less disk space in comparison to splatting primitives.