An efficient point rendering using octree and texture lookup

Abstract

As modern 3D scanning devices handle an enormous amount of point data, generation of triangle mesh becomes time-consuming job. Furthermore, projected triangles are smaller than pixel size, thereby increasing overhead for rasterization. In recent years point-based rendering has become an efficient method for the rendering of complex models. We propose an acceleration method for rendering of point-based geometry. It solves the visibility of point samples by taking advantages of octree structure constructed directly from a point cloud. This enables graphics hardware to render a scene in a single pass thus avoiding additional pass for visibility computation. In addition, we also present an efficient splatting technique to use a lookup table of alpha textures, resulting in alleviation of the load of pixel processing. It achieves better performance over the other methods. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.