A procedural footprint enhancement of global topographic surface with multiple levels of detail

Virtual globes are technologies for visual navigation through a three-dimensional, multi-resolution model of the entire planet. Data representations used in virtual globes, however, lack geometric flexibility at high-resolution levels of the planet-wide terrain surface. This is a problem especially if boundaries between individual geospatial features and the terrain are important. A novel integration of individual polygonal boundaries with a specific multi-resolution representation of the planet-wide terrain is developed in this article. In the preparation stage, the integration relies on an original simplification algorithm applied to the polygonal boundaries between geospatial features and the terrain. Its output is a multiple level-of-detail (LOD) geometry, which can be combined with a known multi-LOD representation of the terrain that uses run-time triangulation. This data representation is suitable for storage in existing database systems, avoids any data redundancy across LODs, and is even independent of the subdivision schema that partitions the planet's surface for the sake of dealing with LODs. At run-time, a novel reconstruction algorithm stitches geometric parts from different LODs together in a manner that augments the multi-LOD representation of the terrain. Within a certain proximity range from a given position, the method reconstructs a scene that preserves topological relations between the boundaries of geospatial features with the terrain. The method also guarantees that certain nearest proximity to the given position consists of the best geometries that correspond to the original datasets. Such properties of the method close up the gap between a mere exploratory visualization of static, pre-generated models and the models supporting geospatial analysis, which is deemed crucial for applications in Geographic Information Systems, Building Information Modelling and other software industries. A prototype implementation and experiment results that prove this method are also presented.