XSplat: External Memory Multiresolution Point Visualization
Renato Pajarola, Miguel Ángel Sainz, Roberto Lario · Zurich Open Repository and Archive (University of Zurich) · 2005
With the popularity of points as graphics primitives, it is important to handle large-scale point sets that exceed available in-core (main) memory. In particular, high-performance level-of-details (LODs) visualization from out-of-core is a challenging problem. In this context we present a novel point-splatting approach, short XSplat, that breaks the main memory barrier. It is based on a paginated multiresolution point hierarchy and virtual memory mapping. The main contributions are a novel block-based sequential multiresolution point hierarchy, an efficient LOD-block paging mechanism and dynamic mapping into video-cache. XSplat is scalable by using sequentialized data structures, and it seamlessly bridges the disk-, mainand video-memory sub-systems. Experiments demonstrate the quality and efficiency that is achieved by XSplat.