Automatic Generation of 2.5D Terrain Models without Occluding Routes of Interest

Abstract

When a car drives in mountainous regions, the views based on conventional perspective projection often suffer from features of interest being occluded. We propose a method for generating disocclusion views in mountainous regions. The terrain is segmented to build a potential set of occluders; and then an optimized viewpoint is determined, and elevations are rearranged. To obtain a smooth deformed terrain, a smooth displacement function is introduced to deform the level-of-detail terrain models. Compared with previous methods, the merit of this study lies in automatically generating disocclusion views with temporal coherence, while keeping the details of the deformed terrain the same as the original terrain. Experiments performed on the 4098 pixel ϫ 4098 pixel mountainous terrain landscape prove that the disocclusion views can achieve 42 to 58 frames/second. Moreover, the shapes of the features of interest on the driving route without occlusion and the spatial configuration of geographical landmarks in its neighborhood can be easily recognized.