A Spherical Volume-Rendering Method of Ocean Scalar Data Based on Adaptive Ray Casting

Abstract

There are some limitations in traditional ocean scalar field visualization methods, such as inaccurate expression and low efficiency in the three-dimensional digital Earth environment. This paper presents a spherical volume-rendering method based on adaptive ray casting to express ocean scalar field. Specifically, the minimum bounding volume based on spherical mosaic is constructed as the proxy geometry, and the depth texture of the seabed terrain is applied to determine the position of sampling points in the spatial interpolation process, which realizes the fusion of ocean scalar field and seabed terrain. Then, we propose an adaptive sampling step algorithm according to the heterogeneous depth distribution and data change rate of the ocean scalar field dataset to improve the efficiency of the ray-casting algorithm. In addition, this paper proposes a nonlinear color-mapping enhancement scheme based on the skewness characteristics of the datasets to optimize the expression effect of volume rendering, and the transparency transfer function is designed to realize volume rendering and local feature structure extraction of ocean scalar field data in the study area.

Keywords

• ocean scalar field
• adaptive ray casting
• terrain fusion method
• nonlinear color mapping
• transparency transfer function
• structure extraction