MANAGEMENT AND VISUALIZATION 
OF HUGE RANGE IMAGES AND DIGITAL IMAGES 
Guo. Ming 3- *, Wang. Yanmin ah 
a Dept.of Geomatic Engineering, Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Zhanlanguan Street, 
Beijing, wangyanmin58@163.com 
b State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, 
Luoyulu Street, Wuhan, guoming61 l@tom.com 
Youth Forum 
KEY WORDS: LiDAR; Spatial modelling; Visualization; Multi-scale Representation; Geo-information management; 3D R-tree 
spatial index; MBB 
ABSTRACT: 
Generally speaking, a large number of range images data will be generated in the process of collecting 3D structure information of 
huge building based on the 3D LIDAR scanning technology. For instance, more than 500 range images data are collected in the 
project of digital survey in Taihedian. Every range image data is at least in 60MB. In the end, the whole size of range images data 
adding other palace are always more than several hundred GB. At the same time, for the modelling and computer simulation with 
range images data, accurate digital images data of huge building should be collected, too. Only in Taihedian, about 2000 pieces of 
photo are made, the size of every piece is about 8MB. It is obvious that it’s not feasible to manage so huge data in OS’file 
management system. How to organize and manage range images data and digital images data will be a very important task in using 
LIDAR technology.FILE structure and Standard Template Library technology are used in reading huge range images file, which is 
in order to parse known format rapidly and efficiently. After rearranging the parsed data, the rearranged blocks in Bytes are put into 
BLOB field in Oracle databases. A new algorithm for interactive rendering of huge range images data based on view-dependent 
level-of-detail (LOD) and clipping windows-dependent exchange between main memory and Oracle database techniques is 
presented. In the process of reading huge range images file, range images data are partitioned into small blocks with the different 
size according to angle information and its MBB. Meantime, 3D R-tree spatial index is created by means of MBB in main memory. 
In the interactive rendering, range images data outside the clipping windows are not rendered. That is, several small blocks that their 
MBBs intersect the clipping windows by searching in 3D R-tree spatial index should be shown on the screen. The distance scan of 
center point of screen to centre point of MBB controls the resolution distribution of points on the screen, so that the small blocks are 
able to be searched and display fast. For the storage of digital images, generally, the whole file is considered as a block or BLOB to 
store in Oracle directly based on I/O data streaming transmission. At one time, some indispensable information should be analyzed 
into attribute field to store in Oracle with the block. At last, a table, which comprises range images and digital images table pointer 
field> corresponding points coordinate field, spatial attitude parameter field, will be created for uniform management in range 
images data and digital images data.The experiment system is developed in VC 6.0 program language and OpenGL 3D graphic 
library. The range images and digital images data sampled from several great halls of Forbidden City are used in experiment. These 
data are stored in Oracle databases with Oracle Objects for OLE (0040). Experimental results show that our approach can not only 
design to allow easy access to range images and digital images data stored in Oracle databases, but also realize real-time rendering 
for huge datasets. Those are the grounds for the modelling and computer simulation with range images and digital images data. 
1.INTRODUCTION 
3D laser scanning technology, also known as the "real 
replication technology," is a high-tech which began to appear 
on the mid-1990s, it is another breakthrough in mapping 
technology after the GPS. Because of its rapid, real-time, non- 
contact, initiative, digital, automated, high-density, high- 
precision performance and interface features, it also overcome 
the traditional measurement of certain technical limitations, its 
application may set off another revolution in measurement 
technology. 
Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture began 
to introduce a variety of different measurement of ground-3D 
laser scanners from 2004. In the ancient architecture protection, 
cultural heritage protection, an quality evaluation of the 
important building construction, building deformation 
monitoring and so on, there are not only gratifying results in 
these aspects, but also a lot of problems. For instance, in a 
digital measurement of ancient architecture project in Forbidden 
City we need to create three-dimensional simulation model, 
using short-range and medium-range ground laser radar and 
high-precision digital camera to scan ancient architecture in 
order to get the range image data and the color digital image 
data. Because of its large volume, such as in a digital 
measurement of Taihedian, there are more than 500 point sets in 
the scanning process, each data volume of point sets is at least 
200 MB, the general scan data into text format PTX reached 
more than 500 M, together with other parts of range image data, 
the total volume often is as high as several hundred GB. 
Meanwhile, in order to carry out true three-dimensional 
modelling and simulation, it also needs to collect high-precision 
color digital image data, only in Taihedian it is the acquisition 
of about 2,000 digital images, each one is an average of 8 MB. 
* Guo Ming. E-mail:b200061113@tom.com.Tel: 13241893234 
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