Level of detail control for texture on 3D maps

This paper proposes a method to control texture resolution levels for large-scale 3D maps of urban areas. Recently, performance of computers has been developed rapidly, but it is still hard to directly handle the large-scale 3D maps on PCs, because of its high requirement for hardware capability. To render it, the 3D data reduction is needed during rendering process. On the 3D maps, texture data, in general, tend to be far larger than geometry data. So reduction of rendering texture data by using the LOD (Level of Detail) is effective to reduce whole data size. To achieve that, we propose a method to control the resolution level of texture. In this method, appropriate texture levels are decided off line according to their rendered sizes on a display and importance of the texture images. This determination is done in advance to reduce processing load during rendering process.