Underground caves and its specific structures are important for geomorphological studies. In this paper we present tools to identify and map speleothems by surveying cave chambers interiors.The cave chamber was surveyed using Terrestrial Laser Scanning to acquire point clouds with high level of detail for 3D model generation. This data with 45 million points is useful for either reconstruction, geomorphological studies or virtual visits of caves.With this point cloud we generated a 3D-mesh to represent the surface model of the cave chamber, which is important to study its geomorphological features. A topological structure of the 3D-mesh was also implemented to get an efficient algorithm to help identifying stalactites.The possibility to publish 3D data on the Web is of particular interest for the geospatial field. For this reason, it was decided to make the cave model available in the Web by developing a 3D graphical interface where users can navigate and interact with the three-dimensional models of the cave. For this Web3D framework it was used X3D, WebGL and X3DOM. Such solution does not require any additional plug-ins or components.
Terrestrial Laser Scanning is a very useful technique for cave studies. This surveying method creates point clouds with high detail levels for 3D model generation, which is indeed useful for either reconstruction, geomorphological studies or virtual visits of caves. The present work generated a 3D model of a cave chamber and developed a framework for 3D data visualization on the Web.Identifying geomorphological structures is one of the goals of this project. The generated 3D-mesh represents the surface model of the cave chamber, which is important to study its geomorphological features. A topological structure of the 3D-mesh was implemented to get an efficient algorithm to help determining stalactites. The recognition and positioning of cave stalactites can provide information on hidden cave features responsible for cave geomorphology.The possibility to publish 3D data on the Web is of particular interest for the geospatial field. For this reason, it was decided to make the cave model available in the Web by developing a 3D graphical interface where users can navigate and interact with the threedimensional models of the cave. For this Web framework, X3D, WebGL and X3DOM were used. Such solution does not require any additional plug-ins or components.
Several technologies exist to create 3D content for the web. With X3D, WebGL, and X3DOM, it is possible to visualize and interact with 3D models in a web browser.
Frequently, three-dimensional objects are stored using the X3D file format for the web. However, there is no explicit topological information, which makes it difficult to design fast algorithms for applications that require adjacency and incidence data.
This paper presents a new open source toolkit TopTri (Topological model for Triangle meshes) for Web3D servers that builds the topological model for triangular meshes of manifold or nonmanifold models. Web3D client applications using this toolkit make queries to the web server to get adjacent and incidence information of vertices, edges, and faces. This paper shows the application of the topological information to get minimal local points and iso-lines in a 3D mesh in a web browser. As an application, we present also the interactive identification of stalactites in a cave chamber in a 3D web browser. Several tests show that even for large triangular meshes with millions of triangles, the adjacency and incidence information is returned in real time making the presented toolkit appropriate for interactive Web3D applications.
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