Terrain rendering using GPU tessellation

Abstract

It has been well accepted that compression is essential to the realtime visualization of large terrain dataset. Many efficient compression algorithms have been presented to enhance the performance of rendering. However, the issue of how to render the terrain after decompression is not well addressed. Most previous rendering methods are not well suitable when compression is involved. In this paper, to overcome this problem, we explore an alternative terrain rendering method which utilizes GPU tessellation. By moving the level of detail (LOD) unit to finer granularity, simplification of terrain models can be performed on regular grids, which is simpler to implement than irregular/semi-regular grids. Only a few indices are needed for the simplification of a dataset, thus will not negate the effect of compression. Experiments show that the method can effectively render large terrains with an error tolerance of one pixel. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.