Integrating Occlusion Culling with Parallel LOD for Rendering Complex 3D Environments on GPU

Real-time rendering of complex 3D models is still a very challeng-ing task. Recently, many GPU-based level-of-detail (LOD) algo-rithms have been proposed to decrease the complexity of 3D mod-els in a parallel fashion. However, LOD approaches alone are not sufficient to reduce the amount of geometry data for interactive ren-dering of massive scale models. Visibility-based culling, especially occlusion culling, has to be introduced to the rendering pipeline for large models. In this paper, we aim to tackle the challenge of integrated parallel processing for both mesh simplification and oc-clusion culling. We present a novel rendering approach that seam-lessly integrates parallel LOD algorithm, parallel occlusion culling and Out-of-Core method in a unified scheme towards GPU architec-tures. The result shows the parallel occlusion culling significantly reduces the required complexity of the 3D model and increases the rendering performance