Interactive Editing of GigaSample Terrain Fields

Previous terrain rendering approaches have addressed the aspect of data compression and fast decoding for rendering, but applications where the terrain is repeatedly modified and needs to be buffered on disk have not been considered so far. Such applications require both decoding and encoding to be...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Computer graphics forum Vol. 31; no. 2pt2; pp. 383 - 392
Main Authors: Treib, Marc, Reichl, Florian, Auer, Stefan, Westermann, Rüdiger
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Oxford, UK Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.05.2012
Subjects:
Computer graphics
Computer science
Data compression
Editing
I.3.7 [Computer Graphics]: Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism
I.4.2 [Image Processing and Computer Vision]: Compression (Coding)
Information management
Studies
ISSN:0167-7055, 1467-8659
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Previous terrain rendering approaches have addressed the aspect of data compression and fast decoding for rendering, but applications where the terrain is repeatedly modified and needs to be buffered on disk have not been considered so far. Such applications require both decoding and encoding to be faster than disk transfer. We present a novel approach for editing gigasample terrain fields at interactive rates and high quality. To achieve high decoding and encoding throughput, we employ a compression scheme for height and pixel maps based on a sparse wavelet representation. On recent GPUs it can encode and decode up to 270 and 730 MPix/s of color data, respectively, at compression rates and quality superior to JPEG, and it achieves more than twice these rates for lossless height field compression. The construction and rendering of a height field triangulation is avoided by using GPU ray‐casting directly on the regular grid underlying the compression scheme. We show the efficiency of our method for interactive editing and continuous level‐of‐detail rendering of terrain fields comprised of several hundreds of gigasamples.
Bibliography:ark:/67375/WNG-DJJ41596-D
ArticleID:CGF3017
istex:ED1565FE963E67535A6C9A75AAEF4540C8E43728
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-1
content type line 14
ISSN:0167-7055
1467-8659
DOI:10.1111/j.1467-8659.2012.03017.x