An efficient collision detection algorithm using range data for walk-through systems

Abstract

We present a simple, but efficient view collision detection method for the walk-through system. The basic idea is to check if the current view position intersects with the range data of the scene. The range data is readily available if the image-based rendering is used, thereby the extra computation needed for the collision detection is negligible. For the polygon-based rendering, although the global range data may not be available, one can regard the z-buffer as the local range data. The proposed method has been implemented and its performance was compared against a well-known octree-based view collision detection algorithm.