This paper presents a new method for realistic real-time rendering of air pollutants based on image processing. The air pollutants’ variable density can create many shapes of mist what can add a realistic environment to virtual scene. In order to achieve a realistic effect, we further enhance thus obtained air pollution data getting from monitor in spatial domain. In the proposed method we map the densities of air pollutants to different gray levels, and visualize them by blending those gray levels with background images. The proposed method can also visualize large-scale air pollution data from different viewpoints in real-time and provide the resulting image with any resolution theoretically, which is very important and favorable for the Internet transmission.

We present a practical and novel approach to implement 3D scene walkthrough for air pollution visualization. This approach includes volume rendering and clipping methods, which are used to visualize large-scale air pollution data. A new viewpoint-based volume clipping method is used while rendering, which is fast and more interactive than previous methods. We achieved expected experimental results and our research could benefit environment monitoring and many other applications associated with pollution visualization.