Understanding the locations of highly occluded paths on a terrain is an important GIS problem. In this paper we present a model and a fast algorithm for computing highly occluded paths on a terrain. It does not assume the observer locations to be known and yields a path likely to be occluded under a rational observer strategy. We present experimental results that examine several different observer strategies. The repeated visibility map computations necessary for our model is expedited using a fast algorithm for calculating approximate visibility maps that models the decrease in observational fidelity as distance increases. The algorithm computes a multiresolution approximate visibility map and makes use of a graphics processing unit (GPU) to speed up computation. We present experimental results on terrrain data sets with up to 144 million points.

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RSVP is available as C++ source code under an open-source licence: http://ohlerlab.mdc-berlin.de/software/RSVP/.