A real-time virtual geographic environment (VGE) can serve as interactive, intuitive visualization tools for exploring, analyzing, synthesizing, and simulating multi dimension geo-data and complex geo-phenomena. The VGE scene can be constructed by terrain models, building models, and natural gaseous phenomena models. This paper used a viewdependent simplification method to improve the rendering efficiency of the VGE scene. The continuous level of detail technique(C-LOD) algorithm was adopted to achieve high frame rates by generating an approximate view-dependent triangulation of large terrain scene. Meanwhile image-based rendering techniques such as the imposter billboard were used to speed up the visualization of 3D object models (e.g., 3D building, 3D trees, smoke, cloud and so on). Using the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region in China as a case area, the visualization environment was built to support real-time rendering of larger-scale geo-scene. Experiment results prove that the scheme addressed in the paper can improve the overall efficiency.

Date Published: 3 November 2008
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 7143, Geoinformatics 2008 and Joint Conference on GIS and Built Environment: Geo-Simulation and Virtual GIS Environments, 71432F (3 November 2008); doi: 10.1117/12.812617

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7143:
Geoinformatics 2008 and Joint Conference on GIS and Built Environment: Geo-Simulation and Virtual GIS Environments
Lin Liu; Xia Li; Kai Liu; Xinchang Zhang; Aijun Chen, Editor(s)