Large Area Terrain Visualization Technology Research

Visualization of terrain information is playing a key role in many applications such as real-time simulation, 3D geographic information system(3DGIS), etc. However with the rapid development of the remote sense and satellite technologies, people expect to investigate or view larger terrain regions with finer precision, which inevitably leads to the real-time visualization of large scale terrain dataset. Thus fast visualization of large scale virtual terrain is advanced.The large scale terrain rendering is a hot issue in computer graphics(CG). The main topics of the large scale terrain rendering are how to read the massive terrain data and how to reduce the amount of triangles in the visualization of the large scale terrain. In this dissertation, LoD model is proposed, with many traditional methods to render the large scale terrain real-time introduced. Followed the traditional methods, three algorithms for real-time rendering the large scale terrain are recommended, with their advantage and disadvantage analyzed respectively.The author uses a quadtree-based LoD algorithm to reduce the rendering triangles number in the research task of "Battlefield Topography Support System(version III)" . In the algorithm, the massive terrain data are blocked, which is useful for the real-time reading of the massive terrain data. With the algorithm of this paper rendering of the large scale terrain is realized with high frame rate and with high image quality.