HYBRID TERRAIN VISUALIZATION BASED ON LOCAL TESSELLATIONS

Hybrid terrain models represent an effective approach to combine geographic data with different acquisition properties. Terrain models constituted by regular grid elevation data may locally integrate detailed TIN meshes to represent morphologically complex terrain features and artificial objects. However, direct rendering of hybrid terrain models poses additional difficulties: holes and geometric discontinuities between the borders of the different parts would appear in the images. In this paper we present two new software based proposals for efficient hybrid terrain visualization. Both proposals generate high-quality geometrically continuous models and support multiresolution methods over regular grids.