Layered point clouds

We present a simple point-based multiresolution structure for interactive visualization of very large point sampled models on consumer graphics platforms. The structure is based on a hierarchy of precomputed object-space point clouds. At rendering time, the clouds are combined coarse-to-fine with a top-down structure traversal to locally adapt sample densities according to the projected size in the image. Since each cloud is made of a few thousands of samples, the multiresolution extraction cost is amortized over many graphics primitives, and host-to-graphics communication effectively exploits on-board caching and object based rendering APIs. The progressive block based refinement nature of the rendering traversal is well suited to hiding out-of-core data access latency, and lends itself well to incorporate backface, view frustum, and occlusion culling, as well as compression and view-dependent progressive transmission. The resulting system allows rendering of complex models at high frame rates (over 60M splat/second), supports network streaming, and is fundamentally simple to implement.

@InProceedings{GM04c,
  author       = {Gobbetti, E. and Marton, F.},
  title        = {Layered point clouds},
  booktitle    = {Eurographics Symposium on Point Based Graphics},
  pages        = {113--120, 227},
  month        = {june},
  year         = {2004},
  editor       = {Marc Alexa and Markus Gross and Hanspeter Pfister and Szymon Rusinkiewicz},
  publisher    = {Eurographics Association},
  address      = {Aire-la-Ville, Switzerland},
  note         = {Conference held in Zurich, Switzerland, June 2--5, 2004 isbn: 3-905673-09-6 idxproject: VPLANET},
  keywords     = {VPLANET},
  url          = {https://publications.crs4.it/pubdocs/2004/GM04c},
}