Premium
Compression of Large‐Scale Terrain Data for Real‐Time Visualization Using a Tiled Quad Tree
Author(s) -
Platings M.,
Day A. M.
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
computer graphics forum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.578
H-Index - 120
eISSN - 1467-8659
pISSN - 0167-7055
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8659.2004.00806.x
Subject(s) - computer science , rendering (computer graphics) , terrain , computer graphics (images) , visualization , quadtree , terrain rendering , real time rendering , tree (set theory) , computer data storage , digital elevation model , real time computing , computer vision , computer hardware , artificial intelligence , remote sensing , ecology , mathematical analysis , mathematics , biology , geology
The aim of the rapid world modeling project is to implement a system to visualize the topography of the entire world on consumer‐level hardware. This presents a significant problem in terms of both storage requirements and rendering speed. This paper presents the ‘Tiled Quad Tree’, a technique and format for the storage of digital terrain models, to work as part of an integrated system for the visualization of global terrain data. We show how this format efficiently stores and compresses elevation data, in a way that allows the data to be read very rapidly from hard disk or similar storage medium, to facilitate real‐time rendering. The results of compressing several distinct data sets are presented.