An Exact Incremental Hidden Surface Removal Algorithm

Abstract

This paper describes an incremental Hidden Surface Removal Algorithm (HSRA), developed to be embedded in a new architecture for raster graphics described in [1,7]. 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 will have the same time complexity as existing algorithms. However, the effort needed for incremental changes is much less than any other known algorithm. The data structures as well as the algorithm are designed to exploit parallelism in computation.