Fast display of large‐scale forest with fidelity

We propose a new hierarchical representation for a forest model, namely hierarchical layered depth mosaics (HLDM). Each node in the HLDM comprises a number of discrete textured quadrilaterals, called depth mosaics (DMs). The DMs are generated from the sampled depth images of the polygonal tree models. Meanwhile, their textures are compressed by a new approach accounting for occlusion. Our rendering procedure traverses the HLDM and renders the appropriate nodes according to a view‐dependent selection criterion. A blending scheme is adopted to mitigate the visual ‘popping’ caused by the transition of levels of detail. The experiment demonstrates that the viewer could interactively walk or fly above the forest with fidelity. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.