Representation and visualization of terrain surfaces at variable resolution

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