PitPit Self-Occlusion Test

Sorry Nathanael, but I tried to find a defintion of the term Self-Occlusion a while back.
If it's not to much bother, could you explain the term?

Oh, and very beautiful images and pointcloud. :)

Occlusion in an optical or a computer graphics sense simply means that a foreground object, when standing between the eye|camera|viewport and a background object, obstructs the view of the background object - that is to say, the foreground object occludes the background object.

In the Photosynth Photography guide we are given a list of synthy and unsynthy types of objects and are given the contrasting examples of a single large tree trunk versus a bamboo grove. The bamboo grove is advised against simply because the stalks are all so small and tightly packed that they each occlude each other very often, leaving the synther with little detail to hold onto.

A bamboo grove is not impossible to synth, but it certainly would take a much higher number of photos to capture individual stalks than the average novice Photosynth user is likely to take.

Having no bamboo nearby and having noticed this sort of plant several times, I decided to take a stab at it, wondering whether the tufts at the top would be feature rich enough to cluster the photos satisfactorily.

In the end, I kept my shoot pretty brief and didn't get too many close shots. I think that the leaves around the base in the majority of the shots certainly helped. 100 photos certainly wasn't enough to capture the individual blades of the grasses but the neighboring dog was not appreciating my interest in the corner of his|her territory, so I cut my visit short. =)

To answer your question explicitly, the blades of grass are occluding each other as a group, thus the bunch of grass can be said to be self-occluding.