An improved fractal construction on 3D DEM terrain profile

It is vital to reconstruct a three-dimensional terrain by a few sparse points in the digital elevation model (DEM). However, the reconstructed surfaces from elementary functions(e.g. lines and cubics) appear too smooth to represent a terrain with self-affinity property. The conventional fractal reconstruction methods are time-consuming and require too many parameters to set. In this paper we propose a probability-based method to speed up the fractal interpolation execution. In addition, the topography curvature is used to determine contraction factor indirectly in the study. The experimental results indicate that the proposed scheme is excellent in computational efficiency and features preserving.