Fast rendering of massive textured terrain data

Fast rendering of massive textured terrain data

This paper proposes a framework based on tile-pyramid model and linear quadtree tile-index, which enables the real-time rendering of out-of-core terrain data sets while guaranteeing geometric and texture accuracy. The Digital Elevation Model pyramid and the orthophoto pyramid are created in advance and the quadtree is used for constructing tile-index and managing data tiles. To achieve real-time loading of terrain dataset, the view frustum culling technology and the target-tiles searching algorithm based on resolution-testing and the tile-request prediction mechanism are used. While rendering the terrain tiles, the dynamic bintree triangulation is used. Experimental results show that based on the current personal computer, this framework can achieve good performance for real-time rendering of massive terrain dataset whose size is unlimited.