Quad-tree atlas ray casting: A GPU based framework for terrain visualization and its applications

Abstract

We propose a novel framework for terrain visualization (We call it Quad-tree atlas ray casting). The main ideal of our framework is to lay the height field textures and the color textures of all visible terrain tiles in a big texture respectively, then use the single big height field texture and the single big color texture to perform ray casting to get the final image. The framework is very simple, but it is advantaged in many aspects, e.g., steady frame rate, effortless levels of detail, efficient out of core, easy vector data rendering and high image quality with screen space error below one. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.