The Visibility octree. A data structure for 3D navigation

This paper describes the Visibility Octree, a data structure to accelerate 3D navigation through very complex scenes. A conservative visibility algorithm that computes and hierarchically stores the structure at a preprocessing stage is presented. The Visibility Octree is used during navigation and its main contribution is its ability to provide an effective control over the coarseness of the visibility approximation. Tests with indoor ship scenes show that the visibility octree performs well on densely occluded environments.Postprint (published version