Visibility preserving terrain simplification— an experimental study

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Abstract

The terrain surface simplification problem has been studied extensively, as it has important applications in geographic information systems and computer graphics. The goal is to obtain a new surface that is combinatorially as simple as possible, while maintaining a prescribed degree of similarity with the original input surface. Generally, the approximation error is measured with respect to distance (e.g., Hausdorff) from the original or with respect to visual similarity. In this paper, we propose a new method of simplifying terrain surfaces, designed specifically to maximize a new measure of quality based on preserving inter-point visibility relationships. Our work is motivated by various problems of terrain analysis that rely on inter-point visibility relationships, such as optimal antenna placement.

We have implemented our new method and give experimental evidence of its effectiveness in simplifying terrains according to our quality measure. We experimentally compare its performance with that of other leading simplification methods.

Keywords

Geographic information systems
Terrain simplification
Visibility
Facility location

Cited by (0)

Research by the first three authors is partially supported by grant no. 2000160 from the US–Israel Binational Science Foundation. Research by the Israeli authors is also partially supported by the MAGNET program of the Israel Ministry of Industry and Trade (LSRT consortium). Research by Mitchell is also partially supported by the National Science Foundation (CCR-0098172), NASA Ames Research (NAG2-1325), Metron Aviation, HRL Laboratories, and the Honda Fundamental Research Lab.