Error-bounded GPU-supported terrain visualisation

Abstract

The interactive visualisation of digital terrain datasets deals with their interrelated issues: quality, time and resources. In this paper a GPU-supported rendering technique is introduced, which finds a tradeoff between these issues. For this we use the projective grid method as the foundation. Even though the method is simple and powerful, its most significant problem is the loss of relevant features. Our contribution is a definition of a view-dependent grid distribution on the view-plane and an error-bounded rendering. This leads to a better approximation of the original terrain surface compared to previous GPU-based approaches. A higher quality is achieved with respect to the grid resolution. Furthermore the combination with an error metric and ray casting enables us to render a terrain representation within a given error threshold. Hence, high quality interactive terrain rendering is guaranteed, without expensive preprocessing.