After many years of intensive investigation and mapping of the topography, a large number of topographic maps were produced by national mapping agencies. The explosive growth and wide availability of topographic data has created a data-rich environment for a variety of GIS users. How to make the best use of such topographic data has become a basic but daunting task. The research challenge now i...

during an 11 days mission in february 2000 the shuttle radar topography mission (srtm) collected data over 80% of the earth's land surface, for all areas between 60 degrees n and 56 degrees s latitude. since srtm data became available, many studies utilized them for application in topography and morphometric landscape analysis. exploiting srtm data for recognition and extraction of topographic ...

Terrain relief is an important feature of geographic environment and a major element of topographic maps. Contour lines are widely adopted as representation of terrain relief in traditional maps. In general, contour maps are still indispensable due to the following reasons: 1) Abundant terrain data are still represented by contour maps; 2) Contour maps contain fewer limits for use in different ...

In the history of surveying and mapping, a large volumes of topographic maps and digital elevation models have been created at various scales throughout the world. However, positional errors and geometric distortions may exist in the topographic contour maps and their derived DEMs due to inaccurate ground control and poor navigation techniques in the early years. In this paper, we present a new...

Some applications such as the autonomous navigation in natural terrain and the automation of map making process require highlevel scene descriptions as well as geometrical representation of the natural terrain environments. In this paper, we present methods for building high level terrain descriptions, referred to as topographic maps, by extracting terrain features like “peaks,” “pits,” “ridges...