Fast visualization of complex 3D models using displacement mapping

Abstract

Displaying 3D models with high detail surface at an interactive speed has long been a topic of interest in Computer Graphics research. However, most high detail 3D models acquired from 3D Laser scanning devices often contain large number of points (or 3D vertices). Currently, the number of points can even reach into the billion, an example being the non-simplified 3D scanning model of Michaelangelo's David from Stanford scanning repository [1]. Unfortunately, current hardware is still not capable of visualizing such vast amount of data directly. Thus, much effort has been focused on different methods of pre-processing such data in order to enable it to be rendered more efficiently in modern Computer Graphics hardware, e.g. GPUs. However, most current techniques, for example 3D mesh simplification are not efficient enough, requiring a significant amount of pre-processing time.