Representation and visualization of terrain surfaces at variable resolution

We present a new approach for managing the multiresolution representation of discrete topographic surfaces. A Triangulated Irregular Network (TIN) representing the surface is built from sampled data by iteratively refining an initial triangulation that covers the whole domain. The refinement process generates triangulation of the domain corresponding to increasingly finer approximations of the surface. Such triangulations are embedded into a structure in a three dimensional space. The resulting representation scheme encodes A all 1ntermed1ate representations that were generated during refinement. We propose a data structure and traversal algorithms that are oriented to the efficient extraction of approximated terrain models with an arbitrary precision, either constant or variable over the domain.