A NEW TERRAIN DATA COMPRESSION SCHEME FOR INTERACTIVE TERRAIN VISUALIZATION SYSTEMS

Over the last years, there has been a great development on real time terrain visualization applications using remote databases. One of the main problems that these applications must face is the storage and transmission of terrain data. Despite the considerable bandwidth increase of internet connection during last years, the large amount of data to be transmitted can easily saturate these connections. On other hand, since data must be stored in the client side, clients need a considerable storage space. In this context, we propose a new compression scheme that solves or minimizes these problems. It is based on JPEG2000 standard; however, the wavelet analysis and synthesis algorithms are modified to allow efficient transmission and reconstruction of terrain data by using tiled pyramids multiresolution techniques. A comparative study including current techniques shows that the proposed scheme obtains a better compression ratio of the terrain data, reducing the storage space and transmission bandwidth needed, achieving a better visual quality of terrain data reconstructed after data decompression.