Efficient Real-Time Level-of-Detail Rendering Using Surfels

A novel point rendering algorithm is presented using surfels as rendering primitives. A surfel is a discrete 3D surface element consisting of the attributes position, normal, and color. It is shown, that a 3D object representation by surfels can be created directly from point clouds of 3D scanners, from polygonal meshes, and from implicit surfaces. The surfels are compressed using quantization schemes for each of the three attributes, and stored in a full binary space partitioning tree in order to render the 3D object in various level-of-details which are view-dependently defined. Three rendering speed-up techniques are presented: hierarchical view frustum culling, hierarchical backface culling using normal masks, and the exploitation of view coherence.