Ringlike Level of Detail in Real-Time Terrain Rendering

Level of Detail is an important method for simplifying terrain rendering in 3D scene. Most traditional LOD models take the elevation into account, and therefore they can not effectively control the quantity of rendering data. This paper proposes an efficient Ringlike LOD algorithm which depends on a structure that consists of many concentric rings with viewpoint in the center. The size of every ring can be pre-established, so the real-time visualization of huge terrain dataset is independent of elevation, thus providing an effective method for real-time visualization of terrain rendering.