The Styria Flyover-LOD management for huge textured terrain models

With the Styria Flyover one can virtually fly over Styria, a province of Austria. The countryside is characterized by a mixture of rather flat regions in the south east and mountains up to 3000 m in the north west. The digital model covers Styria and parts of its adjoining provinces (30,000 km/sup 2/); it is based on a DTM consisting of more than 23 million triangles and on 50 Mbyte texture data (satellite images). The framework combines an R-tree data structure with efficient LOD management (automatic mesh refinement), progressive rendering and dynamic performance adjustment. On a SGI O2 it delivers more than 8 frames per second. The authors' approach demonstrates that efficient algorithms make a fast 3D GIS user interface possible without spending a fortune on hardware. The paper focuses on techniques and data structures to maximize the performance of visualization.

[1]  Jarek Rossignac,et al.  BRUSH as a Walkthrough System for Architectural Models , 1995 .

[2]  William Ribarsky,et al.  Real-time, continuous level of detail rendering of height fields , 1996, SIGGRAPH.

[3]  Peter Shirley,et al.  Visual navigation of large environments using textured clusters , 1995, I3D '95.

[4]  Tony DeRose,et al.  Multiresolution analysis for surfaces of arbitrary topological type , 1997, TOGS.

[5]  Hanan Samet,et al.  Benchmarking Spatial Join Operations with Spatial Output , 1995, VLDB.

[6]  Carlo H. Séquin,et al.  Adaptive display algorithm for interactive frame rates during visualization of complex virtual environments , 1993, SIGGRAPH.

[7]  Hans Jense,et al.  Dynamic management of geographic data in a virtual environment , 1996 .

[8]  Jeffrey F. Naughton,et al.  Avi Pfeffer: Generalized Search Trees for Database Systems , 1995, VLDB 1995.

[9]  Daniel Nüesch,et al.  Automated generation of visual simulation databases using remote sensing and GIS , 1995, Proceedings Visualization '95.

[10]  Hugues Hoppe,et al.  Progressive meshes , 1996, SIGGRAPH.

[11]  Hugues Hoppe,et al.  View-dependent refinement of progressive meshes , 1997, SIGGRAPH.

[12]  Franz Leberl,et al.  Managing Large 3D Urban Database Contents supporting Phototexture and Levels of Detail , 1997 .

[13]  David Salesin,et al.  Interactive multiresolution surface viewing , 1996, SIGGRAPH.

[14]  Hanan Samet,et al.  The Design and Analysis of Spatial Data Structures , 1989 .

[15]  Lance Williams,et al.  Pyramidal parametrics , 1983, SIGGRAPH.

[16]  Jeffrey F. Naughton,et al.  Generalized Search Trees for Database Systems , 1995, VLDB.

[17]  Carlo H. Séquin,et al.  Database and display algorithms for interactive visualization of architectural models , 1993 .