Analysis of visibility masks and resultant image quality
L. A. Talbot, Carol O’Sullivan · Arrow@dit (Dublin Institute of Technology) · 2000
. Virtual Interfaces and Visibility Masks are an extremely efficient method for parallelising the Radiosity Method. They exploit data locality, and keep communication between nodes as low as possible. Previous papers on this technique have been mainly concerned with raw performance, and have failed to analyse how these techniques can impact on the quality of the final image. This paper explores the efficiency of generating visibility masks, and analyses the tradeoff between image quality and speed. 1 Introduction As computing power has increased in the last few years, it has become possible to render larger and more complicated scenes within a reasonable time-frame. As these scenes grow larger, problems are encountered when using the radiosity method to render them. Since the radiosity method exhibits a lack of data locality, large scenes cannot effectively exploit the memory hierarchy of the computer. When using the ray-tracing algorithm, the computation of two adjacent pixel...