Partitioning Trimmed Spline Surfaces into NonSelf-Occluding Regions for Visibility Computation

Computing the visible portions of curved surfaces from a given viewpoint is of great interest in many applications. It is closely related to the hidden surface removal problem in computer graphics, and machining applications in manufacturing. Most of the early work has focused on discrete methods based on polygonization or ray-tracing and hidden curve removal. In this paper we present an algorithm for decomposing a given surface into regions so that each region is either completely visible or hidden from a given viewpoint. Initially, it decomposes the domain of each surface based on silhouettes and boundary curves. To compute the exact visibility, we introduce a notion of visibility curves obtained by projection of silhouette and boundary curves and decomposition of the surface into nonoverlapping regions. These curves are computed using marching methods and we present techniques to compute all the components. The nonoverlapping and visible portions of the surface are represented as trimmed surfaces and we present a representation based on polygon trapezoidation algorithms. The algorithms presented use some recently developed algorithms from computational geometry like triangulation of simple polygons and point location. Given the nonoverlapping regions, we use an existing randomized algorithm for visibility computation. We also present results from a preliminary implementation of our algorithm.