Exact Incremental Hidden Surface Removal Algorithm

摘要

An incremental hidden surface removal algorithm (HSRA) was developed to be embedded in an architecture for raster graphics. The algorithm can be classified as exact since it operates in object space, rather than image space. It can be classified as incremental because this HSRA is able to support addition, removal, and changes on a single object or a group of objects. Thus a firm basis for powerful interaction and animation is established. Due to specially designed data structures for both geometric objects as well as storage of these objects, the hidden surface removal calculation on a complete scene has the same time complexity as existing algorithms. However, the effort needed for incremental changes is much less than any known algorithm. The data structures and the algorithm are designed to exploit parallelism in computation.