Efficient Approximate Visibility of Point Sets on the GPU

In recent years, considerable research has been devoted to the efficient representation, modeling, processing and rendering of point-based models (point clouds). Due to their conceptual simplicity and superior flexibility, point-based representations evolved into a valuable alternative to polygonal meshes. This paper explores the problem of extracting direct visibility from point clouds without explicitly reconstructing the surface or estimating normal. The main contribution of this work is a hardware-accelerated hidden point removal operator. This operator is based on the GPU splatting technique combined with a morphological operation over the depth buffer to reduce the silhouette effect in the final image. The motivation to develop a new operator is the low efficiency demonstrated by existing hidden point removal methods in real time applications with large point clouds. We demonstrate that our proposal is useful for visualizing point clouds with interactive frame rates.