CTOD is a service designed to fetch Cesium terrain tiles (quantized mesh) dynamically generated from a Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COG). The core concept behind this service is to eliminate the need for creating an extensive cache, thereby saving time and storage space. Traditional caching methods often involve generating and storing numerous files, many of which may never be requested, resulting in unnecessary resource consumption. CTOD addresses this issue by generating terrain tiles on the fly, optimizing efficiency and reducing the burden on file storage.

Don't care about on-demand? You can use CTOD to generate a cache for you aswell.

TL;DR

docker run -p 5000:5000 \
-v ./ctod_cache:/cache \
-e CTOD_PORT=5000 \
-e CTOD_LOGGING_LEVEL=info \
-e CTOD_TILE_CACHE_PATH=/cache \
ghcr.io/sogelink-research/ctod:latest

Open the local running demo viewer

Features

• Generate and fetch a layer.json derived from COG, accommodating all projections.
• Retrieve .terrain tiles by tile index, currently supporting grid and martini based mesh.
• Support for extension octvertexnormals
• Support for .vrt and (custom) mosaic
• Averaging of heights and normals on shared edge vertices among terrain tiles.
• Empty tiles with geodetic surface normals.
• Caching for seamlessly stitching neighboring tiles and preventing redundant requests.
• CogProcessor and TerrainGenerator for diverse terrain serving implementations (grid, martini, custom).
• Basic tile caching implementation
• Basic Cesium viewer included for debugging and result visualization.
• Scripts to partly seed cache and generate mosaic dataset.
• Works with Cesium for Unity

Wiki

• Meshing methods
• Tile stitching
• COG Optimization ToDo
• Seeding the cache ToDo
• VRT and Mosaic ToDo

Example result in Cesium

Wireframe and mesh in Cesium using grid based meshing

ToDo

V1.0 (In progress)

• Refactoring
• Cleanup viewer code
• Update Wiki

Future work (V1.1)

• PMTiles for cached tiles?
• Fill Nodata values on the fly
• Mosaic dataset priority
• Profiling to see where can gain some performance
• Support multiple workers
• Prevent others using a deployed service by using a dataset config
• Extension support: Metadata, Watermask

Settings

The following options can be set by supplying args to app.py or setting the environment variables.

argument	environment variable	description	default
--tile-cache-path	CTOD_TILE_CACHE_PATH	Cache dir, not set = cache disabled	None
--logging-level	CTOD_LOGGING_LEVEL	debug, info, warning, error, critical	info
--port	CTOD_PORT	Port to run the service on	5000
--unsafe	CTOD_UNSAFE	Load unsafe tiles (not enough COG overviews or too many datasets in 1 tile), can result in huge and or stuck requests

Run CTOD

Run CTOD using docker or from source, see Settings for configuration options.

Using Docker

Example running CTOD using the docker image with a mounted volume and caching enabled.

docker run -p 5000:5000 \
-v ./ctod_cache:/cache \
-e CTOD_TILE_CACHE_PATH=/cache \
ghcr.io/sogelink-research/ctod:latest

From source

Install and run CTOD in a virtual environment using poetry.

poetry env use python3.10
poetry install
poetry shell
poetry run start

To enable caching, supply --tile-cache-path path with the start command.

poetry run start --tile-cache-path ./ctod_cache

Endpoints

Endpoint documentation for your running CTOD service can also be found under /doc and /redoc

Endpoint: /

Returns a sample Cesium viewer, all values can be changed using the control panel, default settings can be overwritten on startup of the viewer with the below parameters, see the example aswell.

Request

• Method: GET
• URL: http://localhost:5000

Parameters

• minZoom : The mininimum zoomlevel, When set CTOD returns empty tiles for zoom < minZoom, Default (1)
• maxZoom : Maximum zoom level that will be requested by the client, Default (18)
• resamplingMethod : Resampling method for COG: 'nearest', 'bilinear', 'cubic', 'cubic_spline', 'lanczos', 'average', 'mode', 'gauss', 'rms'. Default (None)
• cog : Path or URL to COG file.
• skipCache : Set to true to prevent loading tiles from the cache if cache is enabled in CTOD. Default (False)
• meshingMethod: Meshing method to use: grid, martini, delatin, Default (grid)

Example

http://localhost:5000?minZoom=1&maxZoom=18&cog=./ctod/files/test_cog.tif

Endpoint: /docs

The CTOD OpenAPI documentation with Swagger UI

Request

• Method: GET
• URL: http://localhost:5000/docs

Example

http://localhost:5000/docs

Endpoint: /redoc

The CTOD OpenAPI documentation with ReDoc UI

Example

http://localhost:5000/redoc

Request

• Method: GET
• URL: http://localhost:5000/redoc

Endpoint: /tiles/layer.json

Dynamically generates a layer.json based on the COG.

Request

• Method: GET
• URL: http://localhost:5000/tiles/layer.json

Parameters

• cog: Path or URL to COG file.
• maxZoom : The max zoomlevel for the terrain. Default (18)
• minZoom : The min zoomlevel for the terrain. Default (0)
• resamplingMethod : Resampling method for COG: 'nearest', 'bilinear', 'cubic', 'cubic_spline', 'lanczos', 'average', 'mode', 'gauss', 'rms'. Default 'none'
• skipCache : Set to true to prevent loading tiles from the cache. Default (False)
• meshingMethod: The Meshing method to use: 'grid', 'martini', 'delatin'
• defaultGridSize: The default grid size (amount of rows/cols) to use if there is no specific zoomGridSizes defined for a requested tile, Default (20)
• zoomGridSizes: Per level defined grid size, when requested zoom for tile not specified use defaultGridSize. Default when defaultGridSize and zoomGridSizes not set ({"15": 25, "16": 25, "17": 30, "18": 35, "19": 35, "20": 35, "21": 35, "22": 35})
• defaultMaxError: The default max triangulation error in meters to use, Default (4)
• zoomMaxErrors: Per level defined max error, when requested zoom for tile is not specified use defaultMaxError. Default when defaultMaxError and zoomMaxError not set ({"15": 8, "16": 5, "17": 3, "18": 2, "19": 1, "20": 0.5, "21": 0.3, "22": 0.1})

Example

http://localhost:5000/tiles/layer.json?maxZoom=18&cog=./ctod/files/test_cog.tif

Endpoint: /tiles/{z}/{x}/{y}.terrain

Get a quantized mesh for tile index z, x, y. Set the minZoom value to retrieve empty tiles for zoom levels lower than minZoom. maxZoom is handled in the generated layer.json.

Request

• Method: GET
• URL: http://localhost:5000/tiles/{z}/{x}/{y}.terrain

Parameters

• cog: Path or URL to COG file.
• minZoom : The min zoomlevel for the terrain. Default (0)
• resamplingMethod : Resampling method for COG: 'nearest', 'bilinear', 'cubic', 'cubic_spline', 'lanczos', 'average', 'mode', 'gauss', 'rms'. Default 'none'
• skipCache : Set to true to prevent loading tiles from the cache. Default (False)
• meshingMethod: The Meshing method to use: 'grid', 'martini', 'delatin'

Parameters for meshing method: grid

• defaultGridSize: The default grid size (amount of rows/cols) to use if there is no specific zoomGridSizes defined for a requested tile, Default (20)
• zoomGridSizes: Per level defined grid size, when requested zoom for tile not specified use defaultGridSize. Default when defaultGridSize and zoomGridSizes not set ({"15": 25, "16": 25, "17": 30, "18": 35, "19": 35, "20": 35, "21": 35, "22": 35})

Parameters for meshing method: martini

• defaultMaxError: The default max triangulation error in meters to use, Default (4)
• zoomMaxErrors: Per level defined max error, when requested zoom for tile is not specified use defaultMaxError. Default when defaultMaxError and zoomMaxError not set ({"15": 8, "16": 5, "17": 3, "18": 2, "19": 1, "20": 0.5, "21": 0.3, "22": 0.1})

Example

http://localhost:5000/tiles/17/134972/21614.terrain?minZoom=1&cog=./ctod/files/test_cog.tif

More info

How to use in Cesium

To use the CTOD terrain tiles in Cesium, create and set a CesiumTerrainProvider initialized with the url to the CTOD service. The layer.json file will be requested on the /tiles endpoint followed by .terrain requests while passing the options to the endpoints.

viewer.terrainProvider = new Cesium.CesiumTerrainProvider({
    url: `https://ctod-service/tiles?minZoom=1&maxZoom=18&cog=MyCogPath`,
    requestVertexNormals: true
});

Caching

The CTOD service has a very basic tile caching option, tiles can be retrieved and saved by supplying a cache path when starting app.py or setting the environment variable CTOD_TILE_CACHE_PATH. Based on this path and the requested cog, meshing method and resampling method a tile can be saved and retrieved from disk. the cog path/url will be encoded into a hex string. When a service is started with caching the cache can be circumvented by adding ignoreCache=True to the terrain request.

Nodata

Nodata values in the COG are automatically set to 0 else it is likely that the meshing will go wrong, for now nodata should be handled in the source data (COG) In a future version we can try to fill up the nodata values based on surrounding pixels.

Used libraries

• rio-tiler: Rasterio plugin to read raster datasets. (BSD-3-Clause)
• pydelatin: Terrain mesh generation. (MIT)
• pymartini: Terrain mesh generation. (MIT/ISC)
• quantized-mesh-encoder: A fast Python Quantized Mesh encoder. (MIT)
• morecantile: Construct and use OGC TileMatrixSets. (MIT)