A Review of LOD based Techniques for Real-time Terrain Rendering
Dilip Kumar Dalei, N Venkataramanan, Narayan Panigrahi · 2022 IEEE 6th Conference on Information and Communication Technology (CICT) · 2022
Rendering of large-scale terrain data is important in many niche applications. Advance in satellite technology and remote sensing has made it possible to scan earth's surface at higher temporal frequency and with finer spatial and spectral resolution. This generates huge amount of terrain data, in peta bytes, every second. The data is essential for analysis and as base model for societal and strategic usage. These terrain data need to be rendered for visual analysis and virtual experience in many niche applications such as flight simulator, gaming and GIS in near real time scenario. Therefore, there is a spur in research, development and optimizations of algorithms and models for indexing and rendering of large-scale digital terrain data. Level-of-Details (LOD) is one of the popular approaches for effective representation and interactive display of large terrain models. It renders a large and complex model by generating variable resolution of the same. The concepts have been applied to the polygonal model of a terrain for increasing the rendering performance and user interaction. In the past, a variety of LOD based algorithms are proposed for efficient rendering of large terrain models. This paper reviews some of the popular LOD based terrain rendering techniques over last two decades. The paper talks about various types of LOD methods and their applicability in terrain rendering. It outlines the central idea and important results of each method. Furthermore, it discusses the merits and demerits of these LOD based terrain rendering techniques.