An efficient representation of quadtrees and bintrees for multiresolution terrain models

A space-filling curve in 2,3,or higher dimensions can be thought as a path of a continuously moving point.As its main goal is to preserve spatial proximity,this type of curves has been widely used in the design and implementation of spatial data structures and nearest neighbor-finding techniques.This paper is essentially focused on the efficient representation of Digital Ele-vation Models(DEM) that entirely fit into the main memory.We propose a new hierarchical quadtree-like data structure to be built over domains of unrestricted size,and a representation of a quadtree and a binary triangles tree by means of the Hilbert and the Sierpinski space-filling curves,respectively,taking into account the hierarchical nature and the clustering properties of this kind of curves.Some triangulation schemes are described for the space-filling-curves-based approaches to efficiently visualize multiresolu-tion surfaces.