Least visible path analysis in raster terrain

Least visible path analysis is a basic function in terrain visibility analysis. However, current least visible path planning is constrained to least‐cost path computing on a cost surface obtained from visibility information of all the terrain points on digital elevation models. This kind of method ignores the visibility correlation caused by the overlapped part of the adjacent points' reverse viewsheds. With regard to such a correlation, this paper proposes a new method using the amalgamation of reverse viewsheds to find an optimal path with the minimal visibility dominance. Both methods are implemented using C++ programming, and the experimental results show that the new method produces more accurate least visible paths than the traditional one does.

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