System and process for level of detail selection based on approximate visibility estimation

摘要

A technique and system for selecting level-of-detail representations of geometric models to be rendered within an image processing system. For each geometric model, fractional visibility estimations are computed, thereby ranking how likely it is that a model is visible. Using these rankings, an appropriate level-of-detail for each geometric model is selected to optimize the rendering process by reducing the number of primitives that need to be rendered, while preserving the quality of the final image produced and displayed upon the screen. Visibility estimates for the geometric models are summed to produce a number which is then used to scale the number of primitives used in the level-of-detail representation of the geometric models.