Help Visibility test for texture mapping

Nawar

Hi to all

I am a newbie to computer graphics so please excuse my ignorance. I have
a 3D mesh of a scanned object, and I have images taken from heaps of
known positions. I am currently doing a simple texture mapping procedure
which results in a simple vrml file. This is done offline using C++. The
output is a vrml file with a list of facets, where each facet is mapped
to a portion of an image

Currently the texture mapping process is simply: for each facet

- finds list of images (ie camera postions) where facet is facing camera (ie
backface culling)

- filters the list of images to keep the ones where the angle between
camera and facet's normal is less than a given threshold.

For now the winner image is simply the one that is most normal to the facet.

For most facets, the results are acceptable, but I need to develop this
further, since some facets are mapped to incorrect images due to
occlusion. Now I need to test for visibility (occlusion
culling). I have been doing some reasearch and seems like z-buffer is
the way to go (ie the most common) (please correct me if that's
wrong). But I am not sure I fully understand it. It seems like
for each image
for each pixel
find depth of closest 3D point (on a facet)


But I am sort of lost how does that help in texture mapping. In the end
of my visibility filter, I want for each facet, a list of images where
the whole facet is visible, I will then chose the winner based on some
other future defined criteris. I fail to see how using z -buffer will
tell me whether a facet is fully visible in an image. I might be
mistaken but is z-buffer used mainly to create an image from a new
viewpoint using existing images (I am not interested in that). I would
appreciate any help in clarifying how having a z buffer for each image
will help in deciding whether a facet is fully visible in that image.Is
ray tracing more suitable for my application

Thanks
Nawar