LIght Detection And Ranging (LIDAR) for terrain and land surveying has contributed to many environmental, engineering and civil applications. However, the analysis of Digital Surface Models (DSMs) from complex LIDAR data is still challenging especially for highly sloped landscapes. Commonly, the first task to investigate LIDAR data point clouds is to separate ground and object points as a prepa...

Most terrain models are created based on a sampling of real-world terrain, and are represented using linearly-interpolated surfaces such as triangulated irregular networks or digital elevation models. The existing methods for the creation of such models and representations of real-world terrain lack a crucial analytical consideration of factors such as the errors introduced during sampling and ...

It is possible to obtain useful maps of surface albedo from remotely sensed images by eliminating effects due to topography and the atmosphere, even when the atmospheric state is not known. A simple phenomenological model of earth radiance that depends on six empirically determined parameters is developed given certain simplifying assumptions. The model incorporates path radiance and illuminati...

Digital terrain visualization has received increasing research interest in recent years. One main problem focus has been the large size of terrain data, which needs to be stored on secondary storage hence causing a performance slow-down in terrain visualization. This paper surveys secondary storage terrain visualization techniques with a particular focus on spatial database systems supporting t...

This paper combines terrain with the feature of road engineering to set up the constraint Delaunay triangle net in division by terrain characteristic line, and then forming range constraint Delaunay triangle net. With the data of road midcourt line, the road slope toe line and the point of intersection of road slope toe line could be calculated. Terrain characteristic line can be used to constr...

Local coordinates based on the Voronoi diagram are used in natural neighbour interpolation to quantify the “neighbourliness” of data sites. In an earlier paper, we have extended the natural neighbour or stolen area interpolation technique from ordinary Voronoi diagrams to Voronoi diagrams for sets of points and line segments, by providing direct vectorial formulas for the first order and second...

In this chapter we discuss issues about Level Of Detail (LOD) representations for digital terrain models and, especially, we describe how to deal with very large terrain datasets through out-of-core techniques that explicitly manage I/O operations between levels of memory. LOD modeling in the related context of geographical maps is discussed in Chapters 3 and 4. A dataset describing a terrain c...