A fast 3-D visualization methodology using characteristic views of objects

This paper describes a 3-D visualization method based on the concept of characteristic views (CVs). The idea of characteristic views was derived based on the observation that the infinite possible views of a 3-D object can be grouped into a finite number of equivalence classes so that within each class all the views are isomorphic in the sense that they have the same line-junction graphs. To visualize the changes of scenes in real time, the BSP tree algorithm is known to be efficient in a static environment in which the view point can be changed easily. However, if a scene consists of many objects and each object consists of many polygons, the time complexity involved in traversing a BSP tree increases rapidly so that the original BSP tree algorithm may not be efficient. The method proposed in this paper is object-oriented in the sense that, for all view points, at the preprocessing stage the ordering for displaying the objects is determined. At run time, the objects are displayed based on a pre-calculated ordering according to the viewpoint. In addition, a CV is used as a basic 2-D projected image of a 3-D object.