Title
Minimum spanning trees for valley and ridge characterization in digital elevation maps
Abstract
Texture synthesis employs neighbourhood matching to generate appropriate new content. Terrain synthesis has the added constraint that new content must be geographically plausible. The profile recognition and polygon breaking algorithm (PPA) [Chang et al. 1998] provides a robust mechanism for characterizing terrain as systems of valley and ridge lines in digital elevation maps. We exploit this to create a terrain characterization metric that is robust, efficient to compute and is sensitive to terrain properties. Terrain regions are characterized as a minimum spanning tree derived from a graph created from the sample points of the elevation map which are encoded as weights in the edges of the graph. This formulation allows us to provide a single consistent feature definition that is sensitive to the pattern of ridges and valleys in the terrain Alternative formulations of these weights provide richer characteristic measures and we provide examples of alternate definitions based on curvature and contour measures. We show that the measure is robust, with a significant portion derived directly from information local to the terrain sample. Global terrain characteristics introduce the issue of over- and under-connected valley/ridge lines when working with sub-regions. This is addressed by providing two graph construction strategies, which respectively provide an upper bound on connectivity as a single spanning tree, and a lower bound as a forest of trees. Efficient minimum spanning tree algorithms are adapted to the context of terrain data and are shown to provide substantially better performance than previous PPA implementations. In particular, these are able to characterize valley and ridge behaviour at every point even in large elevation maps, providing a measure sensitive to terrain features at all scales. The resulting graph based formulation provides an efficient and elegant algorithm for characterizing terrain features. The measure can be calculated efficiently, is robust under changes of neighbourhood position, size and resolution and the hybrid measure is sensitive to terrain features both locally and globally.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1145/1811158.1811171
Afrigraph
Keywords
Field
DocType
digital elevation map,terrain data,global terrain characteristic,ridge line,terrain characterization metric,terrain alternative formulation,ridge characterization,terrain sample,terrain region,terrain synthesis,contour measure,terrain feature,minimum spanning tree,upper bound,texture synthesis,ridge,lower bound,dem,graph,line,spanning tree
Computer science,Upper and lower bounds,Terrain,Artificial intelligence,Spanning tree,Elevation,Texture synthesis,Minimum spanning tree,Computer vision,Polygon,Algorithm,Ridge,Machine learning
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.36
9
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Shaun Bangay19717.72
David de Bruyn210.36
Kevin Glass3142.54