High-quality networked terrain rendering from compressed bitstreams

Abstract

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.