About this site

I'm Ashton Mason and this site describes my PhD work in Level of Detail in computer graphics.

My work built on the earlier work of Thomas Funkhouser, who proposed a predictive level of detail optimization algorithm as part of his PhD. My contribution was to extend his algorithm to scene hierarchies -- hierarchical decompositions of scene objects into parts (and parts of parts). I showed that it was possible to apply the same approach to optimize the replacement of collections of objects by simple representations of their wholes.

In the process I found and corrected an important mistake in the algorithm proposed by Funkhouser. I provided a counter-example, proposed a fixed version, and eventually proved its correctness mathematically. Unfortunately by this time I had already published my first paper, with a flawed algorithm stricken by the same fatal flaw as Funkhouser's. I corrected the error in a later paper, so it's important to read both.