Efficient occlusion culling for large model visualization

Occlusion and visibility culling is one of the major techniques to reduce the geometric complexity of large polygonal models. Since the introduction of hardware assisted-occlusion culling in OpenGL (as an extension), solely software-based approaches are losing relevance rapidly for applications which cannot exploit specific knowledge of the scene geometry. However, there are still several issues open on the software side for significant performance improvements. In this paper, we discuss several of these techniques.