Evaluation of terrain rendering algorithms

ABSTRACTEVALUATION OF TERRAIN RENDERING ALGORITHMSİnam, EminTerrain rendering plays an important role in outdoor virtual reality applications,games, Geographic Information System (GIS), military mission planning?s and flightsimulations, etc. Many of these applications require real-time dynamic interactionfrom end users and thus are required to rapidly process terrain data to adapt to userinput. Typical height fields consist of a large number of polygons, so that even mosthigh performance graphics computers have great difficulties to display evenmoderately sized height fields at interactive frame rates. The common solution is toreduce the complexity of the scene while maintaining a high image quality. Thisthesis is an evaluation of three real-time continuous terrain levels of detail algorithmsdescribed in the papers ROAMing Terrain: Real-time Optimally Adapting Meshes byDuchaineau, Real-Time Generation of Continuous Levels of Detail for Height Fieldsby Röttger and Fast Terrain Rendering Using Geometrical MipMapping by WillemH. de Boer. The evaluation and comparison of the algorithms is based on the trade-off of polygon count to terrain accuracy over separate test data sets. The main aim ofthis thesis is research on terrain rendering algorithms that is generate high qualityimage in real-time with using height data.