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, which 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 pro-posed, which is obtained by interpreting the model containing all triangles of the history as a cell complex embedded in three-dimensional space. A major feature of the model is the ability to pro-vide efficiently a representation of the surface at resolution variable over the domain, according to an application-dependent threshold function. Experimental results on real world data are pre-sented, and applications to flight simulation are discussed.