High-quality networked terrain rendering from compressed bitstreams

We describe a compressed multiresolution representation and a client-server architecture for supporting interactive high quality remote visualization of very large textured planar and spherical terrains. Our approach incrementally updates a chunked level-of-detail BDAM hierarchy by using precomputed wavelet coefficient matrices decoded from a compressed bitstream originating from a thin server. The structure combines the aggressive compression rates of wavelet-based image representations with the ability to ensure overall geometric continuity for variable resolution views of planar and spherical terrains with no need for run-time stitching. The efficiency of the approach is demonstrated on a large scale interactive remote visualization of global and local terrains on ADSL networks. A library implementing an early version of this work has been incorporated into a widely distributed geo-viewing system with tens of thousands of clients.

@InProceedings{BGMP07b,
  author       = {Bettio, F. and Gobbetti, E. and Marton, F. and Pintore, G.},
  title        = {High-quality networked terrain rendering from compressed bitstreams},
  booktitle    = {Proc. ACM Web3D International Symposium},
  pages        = {37-44},
  month        = {april},
  year         = {2007},
  publisher    = {New York, NY, USA},
  organization = {ACM Press},
  note         = {idxproject: VICTERRAIN3D, CYBERSAR},
  url          = {https://publications.crs4.it/pubdocs/2007/BGMP07b},
}