Image Compression Terrain Simplification

We suggest a new terrain simplification algorithm which is based on known Digital Image Processing compression methods (e.g. DCT , wavelets compression) that was specially adjusted to fit Digital Elevation Models. DEM-images are terrains or elevation maps represented as gray scale images. We investigate the special nature of such terrain-images and design a unique pre-compression process which defines the parameters to guide the image compression. We perform a largescale experiment comparing several terrain simplification methods and conclude that the new suggested terrain simplification algorithm (named ICTS) leads to significantly better compression results, faster runtime, and most importantly, for a given file size it represents the original terrain better than other terrain simplification methods.