Massive digital elevation models require a large number of geometric primitives that exceed the throughput of the existing graphics hardware. For the interactive visualization of these datasets, several adaptive reconstruction methods that reduce the number of primitives have been introduced over the decades. Quadtree triangulation, based on subdivision of the terrain into rectangular patches at different resolutions, is the most frequently used terrain reconstruction method. This usually accomplishes the triangulation using LOD (level-of-detail) selection and crack removal based on geometric errors. In this paper, we present bimodal vertex splitting, which performs LOD selection and crack removal concurrently on a GPU. The first mode splits each vertex for LOD selection and the second splits each vertex for crack removal. By performing these two operations concurrently on a GPU, we can efficiently accelerate the rendering speed by reducing the computation time and amount of transmission data in comparison with existing quadtree-based rendering methods.

A hierarchical representation formed by an octree for a volume ray casting is a well-known data structure to skip over transparent regions requiring little preprocessing and storage. However, it accompanies unnecessary comparison and level shift between octants. We propose a new data structure named half-skewed octree, which is an auxiliary octree to support the conventional octree. In preprocessing step, a half-skewed octree selects eight different child octants in each generation step compared with the conventional octree. During rendering, after comparing an octant of the conventional octree with corresponding octant of the half-skewed octree simultaneously at the same level, a ray chooses one of two octants to jump over transparent regions farther away. By this method, we can reduce unnecessary comparison and level shift between octants. Another problem of a conventional octree structure is that it is difficult to determine a distance from the boundary of a transparent octant to opposite boundary. Although we exploit the previously proposed distance template, we cannot expect the acceleration when a ray direction is almost parallel to the octant's boundary. However, our method can solve it without additional operations because a ray selects one octant to leap farther away. As a result, our approach is much faster than the method using conventional octree while preserving image quality and requiring minimal storage.

We propose a novel shadow texture generation method with linear processing time using a shadow depth buffer (SZ-Buffer). We also present a method that achieves further speedup using temporal coherence. If the transition between dynamic and static state is not frequent, depth values of static objects does not vary significantly. So we can reuse the depth value for static objects and render only dynamic objects.

Because of its simplicity and intuitive approach, point-based rendering has been a very popular research area. Recent approaches have focused on hardware-accelerated techniques. By applying a deferred shading scheme, both high-quality images and high-performance rendering have been achieved. However, previous methods showed problems related to depth-based visibility computation. We propose an extended point-based rendering method using a visibility map. In our method we employ a distance-based visibility technique (replacing depth-based visibility), an averaged position map and an adaptive fragment processing scheme, resulting in more accurate and improved image quality, as well as improved rendering performance.

There are several optimization techniques available for improving rendering speed of direct volume rendering. An acceleration method using the hierarchical min-max map requires little preprocessing and data storage while preserving image quality. However, this method introduces computational overhead because of unnecessary comparison and level shift between blocks. In this paper, we propose an efficient space-leaping method using optimal-sized blocks. To determine the size of blocks, our method partitions an image plane into several uniform grids and computes the minimum and the maximum depth values for each grid. We acquire optimal block sets suitable for individual rays from these values. Experimental results show that our method reduces rendering time when compared with the previous min-max octree method.

In terrain visualization, the quadtree is the most frequently used data structure for progressive mesh generation. The quadtree provides an efficient level of detail selection and view frustum culling. However, most applications using quadtrees are performed on the CPU, because the pointer and recursive operation in hierarchical data structure cannot be manipulated in a programmable rendering pipeline. We present a quadtree-based terrain rendering method for GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) execution that uses vertex splitting and triangle splitting. Vertex splitting supports a level of detail selection, and triangle splitting is used for crack removal. This method offers higher performance than previous CPU-based quadtree methods, without loss of image quality. We can then use the CPU for other computations while rendering the terrain using only the GPU.