Direct visibility of point sets

Abstract

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.