The key to real-time rendering of large-scale surfaces is to locally adapt surface geometric complexity to changing view parameters. Several schemes have been developed to address this problem of view-dependent level-of-detail control. Among these, the viewdependent progressive mesh (VDPM) framework represents an arbitrary triangle mesh as a hierarchy of geometrically optimized refinement transformations, from which accurate approximating meshes can be efficiently retrieved. In this paper we extend the general VDPM framework to provide temporal coherence through the runtime creation of geomorphs. These geomorphs eliminate "popping" artifacts by smoothly interpolating geometry. Their implementation requires new output-sensitive data structures, which have the added benefit of reducing memory use.

We advocate the use of point sets to represent shapes. We provide a definition of a smooth manifold surface from a set of points close to the original surface. The definition is based on local maps from differential geometry, which are approximated by the method of moving least squares (MLS). The computation of points on the surface is local, which results in an out-of-core technique that can handle any point set.

Illustration using a coarse geometry clipmap (size n=31) View of the 216,000×93,600 U.S. dataset near Grand Canyon (n=255) Figure 1:Terrains rendered using geometry clipmaps, showing clipmap levels (size n×n) and transition regions (in blue on right). Rendering throughput has reached a level that enables a novel approach to level-of-detail (LOD) control in terrain rendering. We introduce the geometry clipmap, which caches the terrain in a set of nested regular grids centered about the viewer. The grids are stored as vertex buffers in fast video memory, and are incrementally refilled as the viewpoint moves. This simple framework provides visual continuity, uniform frame rate, complexity throttling, and graceful degradation. Moreover it allows two new exciting real-time functionalities: decompression and synthesis. Our main dataset is a 40GB height map of the United States. A compressed image pyramid reduces the size by a remarkable factor of 100, so that it fits entirely in memory. This compressed data also contributes normal maps for shading. As the viewer approaches the surface, we synthesize grid levels finer than the stored terrain using fractal noise displacement. Decompression, synthesis, and normal-map computations are incremental, thereby allowing interactive flight at 60 frames/sec.

A comprehensive study of multiresolution decompositions of planar domains into triangles is given. A general model is introduced, called a Multi-Triangulation (MT), which is based on a collection of fragments of triangulations arranged into a directed acyclic graph. Different decompositions of a domain can be obtained by combining different fragments of the model. Theoretical results on the expressive power of the MT are given. An efficient algorithm is proposed that can extract a triangulation from the MT, whose level of detail is variable over the domain according to a given threshold function. The algorithm works in linear time, and the extracted representation has minimum size among all possible triangulations that can be built from triangles in the MT, and that satisfy the given level of detail. Major applications of these results are in real-time rendering of complex surfaces, such as topographic surfaces in flight simulation. Keywords: multiresolution decomposition, triangulatio...

Multi-resolution techniques and models have been shown to be effective for the display and transmission of large static geometric object. Dynamic environments with internally deforming objects pose similar challenges in terms of time and space and need the development of similar solutions. We present the T-DAG, an adaptive multi-resolution representation for dynamic meshes with arbitrary deformations including attribute, position, connectivity and topology changes. We also provide an on-line algorithm for constructing the T-DAG, enabling the traversal and use of the multi-resolution model for partial playback while still constructing it.

We present a new algorithm for best-effort simplification of polygonal meshes based on principles of visual perception. Building on previous work, we use a simple model of low-level human vision to estimate the perceptibility of local simplification operations in a view-dependent Multi-Triangulation structure. Our algorithm improves on prior perceptual simplification approaches by accounting for textured models and dynamic lighting effects. We also model more accurately the scale of visual changes resulting from simplification, using parametric texture deviation to bound the size (represented as spatial frequency) of features destroyed, created, or altered by simplifying the mesh. The resulting algorithm displays many desirable properties: it is viewdependent, sensitive to silhouettes, sensitive to underlying texture content, and sensitive to illumination (for example, preserving detail near highlight and shadow boundaries, while aggressively simplifying washed-out regions). Using a unified perceptual model to evaluate these effects automatically accounts for their relative importance and balances between them, overcoming the need for ad hoc or hand-ttmed heuristics.

Techniques are presented for navigating between adjacent triangles of greater or equal size in a hierarchical triangle mesh where the triangles are obtained by a recursive quadtree-like subdivision of the underlying space into four equilateral triangles. These techniques are useful in a number of applications including finite element analysis, ray tracing, and the modeling of spherical data. The operations are implemented in a manner analogous to that used in a quadtree representation of data on the two-dimensional plane where the underlying space is tessellated into a square mesh. A new technique is described for labeling the triangles which is useful in implementing the quadtree triangle mesh as a linear quadtree (i.e., a pointer-less quadtree); the navigation can then take place in this linear quadtree. When the neighbors are of equal size, the algorithms take constant time. The algorithms are very efficient, as they make use of just a few bit manipulation operations and can be impl...

Contents 1 Introduction 2 2 Map Data Modeling 4 2.1 Two-Dimensional Spatial Entities and Relationships . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2.2 Raster and Vector Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 2.3 Subdivisions as Cell Complexes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 2.4 Topological Data Structures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 2.5 Multiresolution Data Structures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 3 Map data processing 8 3.1 Spatial Queries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 3.2 Map Overlay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 3.3 Geometric Problems in Map Generalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 3.4 Map Labeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

These tutorial notes provide an introduction, review, and discussion of the state-of-the-art on simplification methods, Level Of Detail, and multiresolution models for surface meshes, and of their applications. The problem of approximating a surface with a triangular mesh is formally introduced, and major simplification techniques are classified, reviewed, and compared. A general framework is introduced next, which encompasses all multiresolution surface models based on decomposition, and major multiresolution meshes are classified, reviewed, and compared in the context of such a framework. Applications of simplification methods, LOD, and multiresolution to computer graphics, virtual reality, geographical information systems, flight simulation, and volume visualization are also reviewed.

Multiresolution meshes are a common basis for building representations of a geometric shape at dierent levels of detail. The use of the term multiresolution depends on the remark that the accuracy (or, level of detail) of a mesh in approximating a shape is related to the mesh resolution, i.e., to the density (size and number) of its cells. A multiresolution mesh provides several alternative meshbased approximations of a spatial object (e.g., a surface describing the boundary of a solid object, or the graph of a scalar eld).