Viewpoint quality and global scene exploration strategies

Virtual worlds exploration techniques are used in a wide variety of domains — from graph drawing to robot motion. This paper is dedicated to virtual world exploration techniques which have to help a human being to understand a 3D scene. An improved method of a viewpoint quality estimation is presented in the paper, together with a new method for an automatic 3D scene exploration, based on a virtual camera. The automatic exploration method is related to off-line exploration and is made in two steps. In the first step, a set of “good” viewpoints is computed. The second step uses this set of points of view to compute a camera path around the scene.