Issues in Terrain Visualization for Environmental Monitoring Applications
Ricardo Veguilla, Nayda G. Santiago, Domingo Antonio Rodriguez · 2006
For a more effective study of the interaction betwe en the different natural and human-caused enviromental phenomena that affect the Jobos Bay Natural Reserve we envision the integration of remotely gathered i mages and elevation data from satellite and aerial sensor s, with GIS and real-time data from wireless sensor s into a unified interactive 3D visual representation of the reserves assets. Performing accurate visualization of terrain intera ctively usually require expensive high-end computer systems since the size of the raw data sets involved exceed the limited storage and/or processing capacity ava ilable in common computers. By employing rendering level-of-detail techniques (LOD), it is possible to reduce th e data to a manageable size while retaining an acceptable level detail where required, eliminating the need f or highperformance computing system for visualization. In this work, we will review the traditional and st ate-of-the-art techniques for level-of-detail rende ring of terrain data. Particular interested will be given to a) rec ent work on how to better exploit the processing ca pabilities of consumer-lever graphic processor units, b) support in LOD techniques for out-of-core terrain data mana gement for handling massive terrain data sets. Our purpose is to identify the the most convinient LOD approac hes for a future implementation as part of an ongoing develop ment of a interactive terrain visulization system f or environmental monitoring applications