Algorithms for visibility computation on terrains: a survey

Several environment applications require the computation of visibility information on a terrain. Examples are optimal placement of observation points, line-of-sight communication, and computation of hidden as well as scenic paths. Visibility computations on a terrain may involve either one or many viewpoints, and range from visibility queries (for example, testing whether a given query point is visible), to the computation of structures that encode the visible portions of the surface. In this paper, the authors consider a number of visibility problems on terrains and present an overview of algorithms to tackle such problems on triangulated irregular networks and regular square grids.