Photo-Realistic Imaging of Digital Terrains

Abstract

We present a method for the generation of photo-realistic images of views over terrain datasets by mapping a digital aerial photograph on a perspective projection of a digital elevation map. We use high resolution for both digital maps to increase the quality and the realism of the image at the cost of the overhead of processing very large data bases. In the core of this paper we present an accelerated ray casting technique based on a new algorithm of traversing a pyramidal data structure. Unlike other known traversal techniques, the cost of a single step of the algorithm consists of a few additions, shifts and comparisons only.