Patchwork Terrains: Multi-resolution Representation from Arbitrary Overlapping Grids with Dynamic Update

We present a radically new method for the multi-resolution representation of large terrain databases. Terrain data come as a collec- tion of regularly sampled, freely overlapping grids, with arbitrary spacing and orientation. A multi-resolution model is built and updated dynam- ically off-line from such grids, which can be queried on-line to obtain a suitable collection of patches to cover a given domain with a given, possibly view-dependent, level of detail. Patches are combined to obtain a Ck surface, with k depending on the type of base patches. The whole framework is designed to take advantage of the parallel computing power of modern GPUs.