It is important issue to increase the efficiency of visibility operations in rendering since the most of rendering time is spent for performing visibility operations. In this paper, we present light buffers of area light sources, which provide efficient visibility operations from the sources. The light buffers are extended to support visibility operations not originated from the sources. We also explore their applications such as shadow generation, raytracing and radiosity. Our experimental results show that the light buffers support more efficient visibility operations than the previously developed data structures including linear grids, and octrees.
