C-BDAM – Compressed Batched Dynamic Adaptive Meshes for Terrain Rendering

We describe a compressed multiresolution representation for supporting interactive rendering of very large planar and spherical terrain surfaces. The technique, called Compressed Batched Dynamic Adaptive Meshes (C-BDAM), is an extension of the BDAM and P-BDAM chunked level-of-detail hierarchy. In the C-BDAM approach, all patches share the same regular triangulation connectivity and incrementally encode their vertex attributes using a quantized representation of the difference with respect to values predicted from the coarser level. The structure provides a number of benefits: simplicity of data structures, overall geometric continuity for planar and spherical domains, support for variable resolution input data, management of multiple vertex attributes, efficient compression and fast construction times, ability to support maximum-error metrics, real-time decompression and shaded rendering with configurable variable level-of-detail extraction, and runtime detail synthesis. The efficiency of the approach and the achieved compression rates are demonstrated on a number of test cases, including the interactive visualization of a 29 gigasample reconstruction of the whole planet Earth created from high resolution SRTM data