Hardware acceleration of terrain visualization using ef-buffers

  • Authors:
  • Hyun-Duk Chang;Byeong-Seok Shin

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Inha University, Inchon, Korea;Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Inha University, Inchon, Korea

  • Venue:
  • ISCIS'06 Proceedings of the 21st international conference on Computer and Information Sciences
  • Year:
  • 2006

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Quadtree-based terrain visualization methods have been used in a lot of applications. However, because most procedures are performed on the CPU, the rendering speed is slow. In this paper, we present a quadtree-based terrain visualization method working on the GPU with specially designed data structure, the error-buffer and flag-buffer named ef-buffers. In pre-processing step, error metrics are computed in world space and the error metrics are transferred to the error-buffer. In rendering time, LOD selection and view-frustum culling are processed by evaluating the error metrics. The result is stored into the flag-buffer. To remove cracks or T-junction, the flag-buffer is refined. Then triangulation is performed using the flag-buffer. This method reduces CPU load and performs time consuming jobs such as LOD selection and view-frustum culling on the GPU. We can conclude that our method much faster than CPU-based rendering method without loss of image quality.