Multiresolution representation of non-uniformly sampled terrain databases using wavelets

Abstract

Terrain databases contain data of a terrain which may be uniformly or non-uniformly sampled. In the case of non-uniformly sampled terrains, the resulting structure is a TIN (triangulated irregular network). Since a typical terrain database may contain a large number of triangles, it is often difficult to visualize and organize them. We propose the usage of wavelets in terrain databases to construct hierarchical representations of the terrain skin. It is observed that the resulting structure enables easy construction of multiple LODs (level of details) automatically and also has various other uses like polyhedral compression.