Shape Modeling and Analysis of Terrain

The construction of high-fidelity digital terrain models (DTM) requires the development of adaptive techniques for modeling and analysis of terrain surfaces. The paper presents a conceptual framework for digital terrain modeling which includes all relevant tasks to achieve this goal. This framework consists of fundamental techniques for the generation, manipulation, interpretation, and visualization of DTMs. Whereas generation and manipulation are modeling tasks, interpretation and visualization serve as analysis tools. Since modeling and analysis cannot be treated independently, adaptive modeling requires the integration of techniques from both areas. The role and relationship between modeling and analysis is discussed via examples dealing with sampling, triangulation, interpolation, filtering, joining and merging of DTMs, and feature extraction. Of the various tasks in digital terrain modeling two techniques are described in detail: adaptive interpolation from contour lines, and the extraction of channels and ridges from gridded DTMs. The functions developed within these two topics follow rather pragmatic approaches, including knowledge about the morphology of terrain surfaces, and clearly show the benefit of using adaptive methods.