Visualization methods of vector data on a Digital Earth System

With the rapid development of Digital Earth System, vector data has been widely used as an important data model. Visualization methods to vector data on a Digital Earth System have got more attention. So far, the existing methods can be divided into geometry-based and texture-based approaches basically, and each kind of method applies to different areas with serious shortages in practice. For instance, the texture-based approaches require high memory and the accuracy of the vector data which is unpleasant when zoom in, while the geometry-based approaches have to increase the number of geometric primitives in order to avoid rendering artifacts. To remedy these deficiencies, M. Schneider, M. Guthe and R. klein proposed a texture-based method in 2005 which creates textures on-the-fly and a perspective reparameterization which is applied taking into account the current point-of-view, and then they presented a geometry-based method in 2007 which is based on the stencil shadow volume algorithm. Both of these methods have been greatly improved compared to the previous methods. In this paper, we analyse these two methods and compare their advantages and disadvantages, then conclude with a discussion of their suitable range in practice and give ideas for future improvement.