A Hybrid Visibility Determination Method to Get Vector Silhouette

Silhouette is useful in computer graphics for a number of techniques such as non-photorealistic rendering, silhouette clipping, and blueprint generating. Methods for generating silhouette are classified into three categories: image-based, object-based, and hybrid-based. Hybrid-based method is effective in terms of time complexity but spatial coherence problem still remains. In this paper, we proposed a new hybrid-based method which produces 3D data for silhouette and also guarantees no spatial coherence problem. To verify the efficiency of the proposed algorithm, several experiments are conducted for various 3D models from simple to quite complex. Results show that our algorithm generates no gap between any two consecutive silhouette lines when the silhouette model is magnified significantly.