Direct Visibility Of Point Sets

[edward]

Here's something that I did for fun in Houdini. It implements the basic idea behind this year's SIGGRAPH '07 paper, "Direct Visibility of Point Sets". I also made a flash presentation for it using DebugMode's Wink but unfortunately, it came out really badly when I uploaded it to YouTube (here:

). But here's the .hip file if anyone is curious.

Link to the paper:

http://www.ee.technion.ac.il/~ayellet/papers.html

This paper proposes a simple and fast operator, the ``Hidden'' Point Removal operator, which determines the visible points in a point cloud, as viewed from a given viewpoint. Visibility is determined without reconstructing a surface or estimating normals. It is shown that extracting the points that reside on the convex hull of a transformed point cloud, amounts to determining the visible points. This operator is general - it can be applied to point clouds at various dimensions, on both sparse and dense point clouds, and on viewpoints internal as well as external to the cloud. It is demonstrated that the operator is useful in visualizing point clouds, in view-dependent reconstruction and in shadow casting.

EDIT: YouTube link fixed.

visible_points.hip

[sibarrick]

Hi Edward, I can't get that youtube link to work.

[edward]

I've fixed the link. There was an extra close parenthesis.

[Jason]

I've fixed the link. There was an extra close parenthesis.

Hey, cool - thanks Edward. This could be handy sometime!

[edward]

As a side note, Houdini has since got the ability to compute 3D convex hulls via the Tetrahederalize SOP so it should be easier and faster to do this days. Especially since we can use VEX to delete points in H13.

[Guest mantragora]

As a side note, Houdini has since got the ability to compute 3D convex hulls via the Tetrahederalize SOP so it should be easier and faster to do this days. Especially since we can use VEX to delete points in H13.

Edited December 11, 2014 by mantragora