3D Simplification Methods and Large Scale Terrain Tiling

Abstract

This paper tackles the problem of generating world-scale multi-resolution triangulated irregular networks optimized for web-based visualization. Starting with a large-scale high-resolution regularly gridded terrain, we create a pyramid of triangulated irregular networks representing distinct levels of detail, where each level of detail is composed of small tiles of a fixed size. The main contribution of this paper is to redefine three different state-of-the-art 3D simplification methods to efficiently work at the tile level, thus rendering the process highly parallelizable. These modifications focus on the restriction of maintaining the vertices on the border edges of a tile that is coincident with its neighbors, at the same level of detail. We define these restrictions on the three different types of simplification algorithms (greedy insertion, edge-collapse simplification, and point set simplification); each of which imposes different assumptions on the input data. We implement at least one representative method of each type and compare both qualitatively and quantitatively on a large-scale dataset covering the European area at a resolution of 1/16 of an arc minute in the context of the European Marine Observations Data network (EMODnet) Bathymetry project. The results show that, although the simplification method designed for elevation data attains the best results in terms of mean error with respect to the original terrain, the other, more generic state-of-the-art 3D simplification techniques create a comparable error while providing different complexities for the triangle meshes.