Maximum visibility queries in spatial databases

Abstract

Many real-world problems, such as placement of surveillance cameras and pricing of hotel rooms with a view, require the ability to determine the visibility of a given target object from different locations. Advances in large-scale 3D modeling (e.g., 3D virtual cities) provide us with data that can be used to solve these problems with high accuracy. In this paper, we investigate the problem of finding the location which provides the best view of a target object with visual obstacles in 2D or 3D space, for example, finding the location that provides the best view of fireworks in a city with tall buildings. To solve this problem, we first define the quality measure of a view (i.e., visibility m..