Smugglers and border guards: the GeoStar project at RPI

We present the GeoStar project at RPI, which researches various terrain (i.e., elevation) representations and operations thereon. This work is motivated by the large amounts of hi-res data now available. The purpose of each representation is to lossily compress terrain while maintaining important properties. Our ODETLAP representation generalizes a Laplacian partial differential equation by using two inconsistent equations for each known point in the grid, as well as one equation for each unknown point. The surface is reconstructed from a carefully-chosen small set of known points. Our second representation segments the terrain into a set of regions, each of which is simply described. Our third representation has the most long term potential: scooping, which forms the terrain by emulating surface water erosion. Siting hundreds of observers, such as border guards, so that their viewsheds jointly cover the maximum terrain is our first operation. This process allows both observer and tar...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: GIS
• Authors: W. Randolph Franklin, Metin Inanc, Zhongyi Xie, Daniel M. Tracy, Barbara Cutler, Marcus V. A. Andrade
• Keywords: Database, GIS 2007, Local Terrain, Maximum Terrain, Various Terrain