TřiVis: Versatile, Reliable, and High-Performance Tool for Computing Visibility in Polygonal Environments

TL;DR

TřiVis, a C++ library developed by the authors for computing numerous visibility-related queries in highly complex polygonal environments, stands out as a versatile, high-performance, more reliable and easy-to-use alternative to current solutions that is also free of heavy dependencies.

Abstract

Visibility is a fundamental concept in computational geometry, with numerous applications in surveillance, robotics, and games. This software paper presents TřiVis, a C++ library developed by the authors for computing numerous visibility-related queries in highly complex polygonal environments. Adapting the triangular expansion algorithm, TřiVis stands out as a versatile, high-performance, more reliable and easy-to-use alternative to current solutions that is also free of heavy dependencies. Through evaluation on a challenging dataset, TřiVis has been benchmarked against existing visibility libraries. The results demonstrate that TřiVis outperforms the competing solutions by at least an order of magnitude in query times, while exhibiting more reliable runtime behavior. TřiVis is freely available for private, research, and institutional use at https://github.com/janmikulacz/trivis.

Figures (3)

• Figure 1: Different visibility queries in the same polygonal environment. From left to right, first row: two-points visibility, ray-shooting, visibility polygon. Second row: $d$-visibility region, visible vertices, $d$-visible vertices. Third row: vertex-vertex visibility graph, point-point visibility graph, vertex-point visibility graph.
• Figure 2: Code snippet for computing a $d$-visibility region from a query point $q$ using TřiVis.
• Figure 3: Examples of polygonal environments from the Iron Harvest dataset.