Representation and visualization of terrain surfaces at variable resolution

We present a new approach for managing the representation of discrete topographic surfaces at variable resolution. It is based on a unified model encoding a history of either refinement or simplification of a triangulation decomposing a plane domain. An efficient data structure is proposed. It is obtained by interpreting the model containing all triangles of the history as a cell complex embedded in 3D space. A major feature of the model is its ability to provide efficiently a representation of the surface at a resolution variable over the domain according to an application-dependent threshold function. Experimental results on real-world data are presented, and applications to flight simulation are discussed.