A VIRTUAL GLOBE-BASED MULTI-RESOLUTION TIN SURFACE MODELING AND VISUALIZETION METHOD

Abstract. The integration and visualization of geospatial data on a virtual globe play an significant role in understanding and analysis of the Earth surface processes. However, the current virtual globes always sacrifice the accuracy to ensure the efficiency for global data processing and visualization, which devalue their functionality for scientific applications. In this article, we propose a high-accuracy multi-resolution TIN pyramid construction and visualization method for virtual globe. Firstly, we introduce the cartographic principles to formulize the level of detail (LOD) generation so that the TIN model in each layer is controlled with a data quality standard. A maximum z-tolerance algorithm is then used to iteratively construct the multi-resolution TIN pyramid. Moreover, the extracted landscape features are incorporated into each-layer TIN, thus preserving the topological structure of terrain surface at different levels. In the proposed framework, a virtual node (VN)-based approach is developed to seamlessly partition and discretize each triangulation layer into tiles, which can be organized and stored with a global quad-tree index. Finally, the real time out-of-core spherical terrain rendering is realized on a virtual globe system VirtualWorld1.0. The experimental results showed that the proposed method can achieve an high-fidelity terrain representation, while produce a high quality underlying data that satisfies the demand for scientific analysis.