Title: An efficient simplification and real-time rendering algorithm for large-scale terrain

Authors: Lai Kang, Jiangbin Xu, Chao Yang, Bing Yang, Lingda Wu

Addresses: College of Information Systems and Management, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China. ' College of Information Systems and Management, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China. ' College of Information Systems and Management, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China. ' College of Information Systems and Management, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China. ' College of Information Systems and Management, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China

Abstract: Aiming at simplifying and real-time rendering of large-scale terrain, the whole terrain is first divided into terrain blocks, and for each block, feature points are picked out to generate a Triangulated Irregular Network (TIN) model. Then, the hierarchical multi-resolution model of the terrain is created in a bottom-to-up mode. Cracks between terrain blocks can be easily remedied by boundary sharing. At run-time, whether a terrain block is to be rendered or not depends both on its isotropic error metric and the result of view frustum culling. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm performs efficiently.

Keywords: real-time rendering; 3D terrain; multi-resolution; TIN; triangulated irregular network; quad-trees; large-scale terrain; terrain blocks; boundary sharing; feature points.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCAT.2010.034145

International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology, 2010 Vol.38 No.1/2/3, pp.106 - 112

Received: 31 Jul 2008
Accepted: 05 Jan 2009

Published online: 16 Jul 2010 *

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