Plants and trees are an essential part of outdoor scenes. They are represented by such a vast number of polygons that performing real-time visualization is still a problem in spite of the advantages of the hardware. Some methods have appeared to solve this drawback based on point- or image-based rendering. However, geometry representation is required in some interactive applications. This work presents a simplification method that deals with the geometry of the foliage, reducing the number of primitives that represent these objects and making their interactive visualization possible. It is based on an image-based simplification that establishes an order of leaf pruning and reduces the complexity of the canopies of trees and plants. The proposed simplification method is viewpoint-driven and uses the mutual information in order to choose the leaf to prune. Moreover, this simplification method avoids the pruned appearance of the tree that is usually produced when a foliage representation is formed by a reduced number of leaves. The error introduced every time a leaf is pruned is compensated for if the size of the nearest leaf is altered to preserve the leafy appearance of the foliage. Results demonstrate the good quality and time performance of the presented work.
Keywords: geometric simplification; mutual information; vegetation visualization.