Inexpensive Reconstruction and Rendering of Realistic Roadside Landscapes

6 In this paper we present an inexpensive approach to create highly-detailed reconstructions of the landscape surrounding a road. Our method is based on a space-efficient semi-procedural representation of the terrain and vegetation supporting high-quality real-time rendering not only for aerial views but also at road level. We can integrate photographs along selected road stretches. We merge the point clouds extracted from these photographs with a low-resolution digital terrain model through a novel algorithm which is robust against noise and missing data. We precompute plausible locations for trees through an algorithm which takes into account perceptual cues. At run-time we render the reconstructed terrain along with plants generated procedurally according to precomputed parameters. Our rendering algorithm ensures visual consistency with aerial imagery and thus it can be integrated seamlessly with current virtual globes.