Adaptive Streaming and Rendering of Large Terrains: A Generic Solution

Abstract

We describe a generic solution for remote adaptive streaming and rendering of large terrains. The challenge is to ensure a fast rendering and a rapidly improving quality with any user interaction, network capacity and rendering system performance. We adapt to these constraints so loading and rendering speeds do not depend on the size of the database. We can thus use any database with any client device. Our solution relies on a generic data structure to adaptively handle data from the server hard disk to the client rendering system. The same methods apply whatever is done with these data: only the data themselves and the rendering system vary. We base our data structure on existing solutions with good properties and add new methods to handle it more efficiently. In particular we avoid loading irrelevant or redundant data and we request the most important data first. We also avoid costly data structure operations as much as possible, in favor of “in-place” data updates and selection using sample masks.