An efficient output-sensitive hidden-surface removal algorithm for polyhedral terrains,☆☆

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Abstract

In this paper, we present an algorithm for hidden surface removal for a class of polyhedral surfaces which have a property that they can be ordered relatively quickly. For example, our results apply directly to terrain maps. A distinguishing feature of our algorithm is that its running time is sensitive to the actual size of the visible image, rather than the total number of intersections in the image plane which can be much larger than the visible image. The time complexity of this algorithm is O((k + n) log2n) where n and k are, respectively, the input and the output sizes. Thus, in a significant number of situations this will be faster than the worst case optimal algorithms which have running time of Ω(n2) irrespective of the output size.

Keywords

Algorithms
Data-structures
Computational geometry
Graphics
Hidden-surface removal

Cited by (0)

This research was supported by National Science Foundation Grant CCR-8696134, by a grant from the Office of Naval Research under contract ONR-N00014-87-K0310 and by Air Force Contract AFSOR-87-0386.

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A preliminary version of the main result appeared as a part of the paper entitled ‘An efficient output-sensitive hidden surface removal algorithm and its parallelization’ in the Proc. of the 4th Annual ACM Symposium on Computational Geometry, 1988.