VIP insertion heuristic generates an approximate terrain surface (usually triangulated as a TIN) from an input set of sample data (points (x,y) with elevations).

The idea of a VIP insertion heuristic is easy -- start with a coarse, triangulated surface representating a terrain. For each sampled data point, compare elevation data with the elevation that would be assigned by the triangulated surface. Insert one or several points that attain the maximum error.

Garland & Heckbert's scape implementation was a good one a decade ago.

http://graphics.cs.uiuc.edu/~garland/software/scape.html (Old page: http://graphics.cs.uiuc.edu/~garland/CMU/scape/)

Some links to papers

• Terrain simplification survey by Garland & Heckbert. http://graphics.cs.uiuc.edu/~garland/papers/simp.pdf
• de Berg & Dobrint, 1995. http://archive.cs.uu.nl/pub/RUU/CS/techreps/CS-1995/1995-12.pdf
• Peter Lindstrom, Valerio Pascucci, Visualization of Large Terrains Made Easy, Proceedings of IEEE Visualization 2001, October 2001, pp. 363-370, 574. http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~lindstro/papers/vis2001a/
• Renato Pajarola, Overview of Quadtree-based Terrain Triangulation and Visualization, UCI-ICS Technical Report No. 02-01, January 2002 http://www.ics.uci.edu/~pajarola/pub/UCI-ICS-02-01.pdf

-- JackSnoeyink - 18 Feb 2005
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