US Patent 9704055 Occlusion render mechanism for point clouds

A method, apparatus, system, article of manufacture, and computer readable storage medium provide the ability to render point cloud data. After obtaining point cloud data, polygons are fit to the point cloud data. A texture atlas is created for each of the polygons. A lookup table is generated from the texture atlases and maps each pixel to a corresponding texture location. When a scene is loaded for rendering/processing, the polygons and texture atlas are loaded and projected into an off-screen buffer that defines a depth map of the scene with approximations of a depth per pixel in screen space. The off-screen buffer is used as a lookup table to determine texture data to be rendered for the scene.