Adaptive data structures and algorithms for efficient visualization and data management at runtime of terrain and feature data

An approach is presented for rendering terrain and feature data in real time, applicable to flight simulators and to cockpit displays for generating synthetic vision. Basically, a hierarchical adaptive triangulation technique is used for dealing with the terrain elevation data in the memory. The interpolation hierarchical surplus is used as a criterion to detect redundant data and serves to control the error of the terrain approximation. With this level-of-detail mechanism and an easy visibility check due to the hierachical adaptive strategy, a high frame rate can be reached. A special organisation of the data is developed to exchange parts of the data at runtime in order to limit the required memory. On multiprocessor computer architectures, the reloading data process can be performed in the background without interrupting the rendering by starting parallel running tasks (threads).