Mountain cartography in Canada is challenged by limited human resources relative to a large land mass and in many areas, a limited number of potential users. The development of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and the generation of digital data have enabled the design and production of some maps in the westernmost province of British Columbia (BC), without the high cost and training associa...

We address the problem of extending topographic maps to color images. A topographic map gives a morphological and a geometrical representation of the information contained in natural images. Two approaches are presented and discussed. The first one is new and consists in defining a total order in IR3 in accordance with the human visual perception of shapes. This allows to define color topograph...

Neurons typically settle at positions that match the location of their synaptic targets, creating topographic maps. In the spinal cord, the organization of motor neurons into discrete clusters is linked to the location of their muscle targets, establishing a topographic map of punctate design. To define the significance of motor pool organization for neuromuscular map formation, we assessed the...

The mapping of the topographic representation of the visual field onto cortical areas changes throughout the hierarchy of cortical visual areas. The changes are believed to reflect the establishment of modules with different spatial processing emphasis. The receptive fields (RFs) of neurons within these modules, however, may not be governed by the same spatial topographic map parameters. Here i...

This paper demonstrates how a new shape from shading scheme can be used to extract topographic information from 2D intensity imagery. The shape-from-shading scheme has two novel ingredients. Firstly, it uses a geometric update procedure which allows the image irradiance equation to be satisfied as a hard-constraint. This not only improves the data-closeness of the recovered needle-map, but also...

Quantifying the success of the topographic preservation achieved with a neural map is difficult. In this paper we present Topological Correlation, Tc, a method that assesses the degree of topographic preservation achieved based on the linear correlation between the topological distances in the neural map, and the topological distances in the induced Delaunay triangulation of the network nodes. ...

The Self-Organizing Map (SOM) algorithm is widely used for building topographic maps of data represented in a vectorial space, but it does not operate with dissimilarity data. Soft Topographic Map (STM) algorithm is an extension of SOM to arbitrary distance measures, and it creates a map using a set of units, organized in a rectangular lattice, defining data neighbourhood relationships. In the ...

A topographic map is a two-dimensional, nonlinear approximation of a potentially high-dimensional data manifold, which makes it an appealing instrument for visualizing and exploring high-dimensional data. The Self-Organizing Map (SOM) is the most widely used algorithm, and it has led to thousands of applications in very diverse areas. In this chapter, we will introduce the SOM algorithm, discus...

A common task in coal exploration is evaluating reserves by estimating some form of isopach map. Available machine-contouring packages, because of their gridding/contouring sequence, are generally unsatisfactory for this purpose. A different approach considers an isopach map as the difference between two complete digital models of the upper and lower surfaces involved. In addition, whereas a to...

Recently, there has been an outburst of interest in extending topographic maps of vectorial data to more general data structures, such as sequences or trees. The representational capabilities and internal representations of the models are not well understood. We concentrate on a generalization of the Self-Organizing Map (SOM) for processing sequential data – the Recursive SOM (RecSOM [1]). We a...