Visibility transition planning for dynamic camera control

Abstract

A camera control system is provided that uses global planning to compute large, occlusion free camera paths through complex environments, incorporating visibility of a focus point into the search strategy, so that a path is chosen along which the focus target is in view or, in general, to compute a visibility graph. A visibility roadmap data structure permits precomputation of coarse representations of collision-free paths through an environment, together with estimates of pair-wise visibility between scene portions. At runtime, path planning can be done using the precomputed roadmap values to find a coarse path, and then refined to the camera path using occlusion maps computed on-the-fly. Iterative smoothing, together with a physically-based camera model, can be used to have the path followed by the camera smooth in both space and time. The data structure can be adapted at runtime to deal with dynamic occluders that move in an environment.