Accurate triangular regular network adjustment to large digital elevation models

Abstract

Nowadays, large volumes of terrain data are available to use as Digital Elevation Models, from which coarser meshes can be progressively generated for visualization and other purposes. Previous studies compared different methods to adjust those meshes, concluding that no method performs the best for all kinds of terrain. In this work, a pipeline to accurately adjust TRNs to DEM is proposed. An initial approximation is calculated by solving a linear system from input data. Vertices with a major contribution to the global error of the mesh are then tuned using a local refinement algorithm. Experimentation shows that meshes adjusted using the proposed pipeline fit better the original DEM than ones generated using classic methods as linear interpolation for several benchmark elevation models.