PT Journal AU Sokolov, D Plemenos, D TI High level methods for scene exploration SO JVRB - Journal of Virtual Reality and Broadcasting PY 2007 VL 3(2006) IS 12 DI 10.20385/1860-2037/3.2006.12 DE Scene understanding; automatic virtual camera; good point of view AB Virtual worlds exploration techniques are used in a wide variety of domains — from graph drawing to robot motion. This paper is dedicated to virtual world exploration techniques which have to help a human being to understand a 3D scene. An improved method of viewpoint quality estimation is presented in the paper, together with a new off-line method for automatic 3D scene exploration, based on a virtual camera. The automatic exploration method is working in two steps. In the first step, a set of “good” viewpoints is computed. The second step uses this set of points of view to compute a camera path around the scene. Finally, we define a notion of semantic distance between objects of the scene to improve the approach. ER