Capturing full resolution perspective and stereo views of large DEMs

Abstract

A custom software to capture still views of images draped on digital surfaces is presented. It is called ViCam (for virtual camera). Unlike off the shelf software packages, our system is completely controlled by the user, allowing the visualization of a scene from an arbitrary viewpoint with an arbitrary (virtual) optic geometry (i.e. field of view angle). This software can work in loop over very large tiled datasets handled by a Geographic Information System (GIS) package, providing in output global views of the entire input area as single and seamless image layers at any desired resolution. Output image layers can be derived also in stereo anaglyph mode, allowing a thorough 3-dimensional perception of the landscape morphology as derived by the input elevation dataset. This method is here applied to two test cases showing the performances of the procedure. A website is also addressed where seamless perspective and stereo views of the landscape of the Italian territory preserving the input 10 m or 5 m resolution can be examined.