Virtual Reality Simulation plays important role in teleoperation of lunar rovers during exploration phase as well as in the design of rover and its systems, performance evaluation during R&D phase. Present simulation methods for lunar rovers have several drawbacks in terms of difficulty in simulating terrains, rover terrain interfaces, simulating dynamics of slip and slide to realize smooth mob...

Many applications, including 3D Geographic Information Systems and flight simulation, rely on 3D terrain models. A system that supports these applications should ideally provide real-time interactive rendering of section of a large set of terrain data that may be accessed remotely using a client/server system. We present a Web-based system for interactive 3D terrain rendering using Virtual Real...

Terrain representation is one of the most common tasks in visualization of geoinformation. In order to realistically visualize the real landscape, several issues have to be addressed, in particular, how to combine terrain meshes and texture images. In this paper, Level of Detail (LoD) is used to treat both terrain meshes and texture images for producing realistic visualization with better perfo...

Some applications such as the autonomous navigation in natural terrain and the automation of map making process require high-level scene descriptions as well as geometrical representation of the natural terrain environments. In this paper, we present methods for building high level terrain descriptions, referred as topographic maps, by extracting terrain features like "peaks", "pits", "ridges",...

In the field of terrain visualization, the most efficient tool for real time rendering of complex landscape is level of detail (LOD) technique. In this paper, an optimization quadtree-based algorithm for dynamic generation continuous levels of a given complex landscape in real time is developed. In this algorithm, the conception of view-dependent is introduced, the fast searching algorithm for ...

The performance of the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model in wind simulation was evaluated under different numerical and physical options for an area of Portugal, located in complex terrain and characterized by its significant wind energy resource. The grid nudging and integration time of the simulations were the tested numerical options. Since the goal is to simulate the near-surface wi...

Terrain data can be stored in a variety of data structures, data models and data formats. A data structure is the internal representation or machine storage method, while a data format is the actual specification of the data structure, and provides a scheme for the systematic storage of data for transfer, processing and retrieval. A data model instead is a more complex entity that, in this tent...

World Cup (WC) alpine ski racing consists of four main competition disciplines (slalom, giant slalom, super-G and downhill), each with specific course and terrain characteristics. The International Ski Federation (FIS) has regulated course length, altitude drop from start to finish and course setting in order to specify the characteristics of the respective competition disciplines and to contro...

This paper describes the methodology adopted for developing a simulator for airborne altimetric LiDAR. The goal is to model LiDAR sensor functioning so LiDAR data can be generated for a user specified terrain with given parameters of the sensor and aerial platform. The simulator is conceived having three components: 1) Terrain component, 2) Sensor component and 3) Platform component. Terrain co...

In many applications, three dimensional terrain scene has to be updated in local area with high-precision data, in order to build a local high-precision scene. Aim at the dynamic updating of local terrain data, this paper puts forward a GPU tessellation-based "Mosaic" method of local high precision terrain. Through the interpolation and subdivision on the terrain grid within the updating area i...