More Information
Advantages of O-Buffer
| Accuracy | The O-buffer can provide much higher spatial precision for samples than the same resolution images and volumes. Even though the O-buffer still has a limited resolution, its spatial precision is often adequate or can be tailored to the application. |
| Efficiency | Samples position in the O-buffer is encoded as offsets to an implicitly defined regular grid, thus it is compact compared to other sample-based representations (e.g., sample lists). The O-buffer can be warped efficiently by incremental computation. It can further provide better image quality by avoiding multiple resamplings and delaying reconstruction to the final rendering stage. |
| Semi-regularity | The O-buffer strikes a middle ground between regular representations (images and volumes) and irregular representations (sample lists) for samples. It is a semi-regular structure which lends itself to efficient construction and rendering. |
| Uniformity | The O-buffer provides a uniform framework to represent various irregular and regular sample primitives in computer graphics, such as images, points, and volumes. Thus, the O-buffer also provides a unified framework to mix these primitives in the same scene. |
| Versatility | The O-buffer is a versatile representation and can be used to solve a variety of problems in graphics, such as limited resolution of images and volumes, antialiasing for surface rendering, sample caching for image-based or point sample rendering, data mixing for hybrid volume rendering, irregular sample organization, and level-of-detail management for samples, to name a few. |
| Flexibility | Storing more spatial information with samples makes it possible for O-buffers to store multiple samples in one cell. Therefore, more flexible and accurate multi-resolution schema can be developed for images and volumes |
Applications of O-Buffer
- Image-based rendering
- Point-based rendering
- Volume rendering
- Solid modeling
- Image processing and computer vision