Aiming to deal with the difficult issues of terrain data model simplification and crack disposal,the paper proposed an improved level of detail (LOD) terrain rendering algorithm,in which a variation coefficient of elevation is introduced to express the undulation of topography.Then the coefficient is used to construct a node evaluation function in the terrain data model simplification step.Furthermore,an edge reduction strategy is combined with the improved restrictive quadtree segmentation to handle the crack problem.The experiment results demonstrated that the proposed method can reduce the amount of rendering triangles and enhance the rendering speed on the premise of ensuring the rendering effect compared with a traditional LOD algorithm.