Approximate Visibility for Illumination Computations using Point Clouds

In this paper, we present a simple technique to evaluate the visibility between pairs of points in a scene. In most current rendering algorithms, visibility queries are evaluated exactly. Our approach approximates the visibility value between two points using a point cloud representation of the surfaces in the scene. The computed value is a function of the distance and orientation of points in the point cloud relative to the line segment connecting the two query points.