Manipulation of 3D Surface Data within Web-based 3D Geo-Processing

An efficient modeling and management of a large amount of surface data for a wide rage of geographic information play an important role in determining the functionality of 3D geographic information system. It has been put many efforts to design and manage an effective way to enhence the manipulation of the data by considering geometry type and data structures. Recently, DEM(Data Elevation Model) and TIN(Triangulated Irregular Network) are used for representing surface data. In this paper, we propose a 3D data processing method. The method utilizes the major properties of DEM and TIN, respectively. Furthermore, by approximating DEM with a TIN of an appropriate resolution, we can support a fast and realistic surface modeling. We implement the structure with the following 4 level stages. The first is an optimal resolution of DEM which represent all of wide range of geographic data. The second is the full resolution DEM which is a subarea of original data generated by user's selection in our implemeatation. The third is the TIN approximation of this data with a proper resolution determined by the relative position with the camera. And the last step is multi-resolution TIN data whose resolution is dynamically decided by considering which direction user take notice currently. Specially, the TIN of the last step is designed for realtime camera navigation. By using the structure we implemented realtime surface clipping, efficient approximation of height field and the locally detailed surface LOD(Level of Detail). We used the initial 10-meter sampling DEM data of Seoul, KOREA and implement the structure to the 3D Virtual GIS based on the Internet.