A Real-Time Rendering Algorithm of Large-Scale Point Clouds or Polygon Meshes Using GLSL

Received 2 July 2014; received in revised form 27 July 2014; accepted 29 July 2014ABSTRACTThis paper presents a real-time rendering algorithm of large-scale geometric data using GLSL(OpenGL shading language). It details the VAO (vertex array object) and VBO(vertex bufferobject) to be used for up-loading the large-scale point clouds and polygon meshes to a graphicvideo memory, and describes the shader program composed by a vertex shader and a fragmentshader, which manipulates those large-scale data to be rendered by GPU. In addition, weexplain the global rendering procedure that creates and runs the shader program with the VAOand VBO. Finally, a rendering performance will be measured with application examples, fromwhich it will be demonstrated that the proposed algorithm enables a real-time rendering of largeamount of geometric data, almost impossible to carry out by previous techniques.Key Words: Fragment shader, GLSL, Large-scale point cloud, Real-time rendering, Shaderprogram, Vertex shader, Video memory