Efficient perspective-accurate silhouette computation
Author(s): Mihai Pop, Gill Barequet, Christian A. Duncan, Michael T. Goodrich, Wenjing Huang, Subodh Kumar.
Proceedings: Proc. 17th Ann. ACM Symp. on Computational Geometry (SoCG), pp. 60--68, Medford, June,
2001.
[BibTeX] 
Abstract:
Silhouettes are perceptually and geometrically salient features of geometric models. Hence a number of graphics and visualization applications need to find them to aid further processing. The efficient computation of silhouettes, especially in the context of perspective projection, is known to be difficult. This paper presents a novel efficient and practical algorithm to compute silhouettes from a sequence of viewpoints under perspective projection. Parallel projection is a special case of this algorithm. Our approach is based on a point-plane duality in three dimensions, which allows an efficient computation of the changes in the silhouette of a polygonal model between consecutive frames. In addition we present several applications of our technique to problems from computer graphics and medical visualisation. We also provide experimental data that show the efficiency of our approach.