Scalable shortest paths browsing on land surface

The growing popularity of online Earth visualization tools and geo-realistic games and the availability of high resolution terrain data have motivated a new class of queries to the interests of the GIS and spatial database community: spatial queries (e.g., kNN) over land surface. However, the fundamental challenges that restrict the applicability of these studies to real world applications are the prohibitive time complexity and storage overhead to precompute the shortest surface paths. In this paper, for the first time, we propose an approximate solution to address both challenges and allow browsing the shortest surface paths in O( ) time, where N is the size of the terrain. With this method, the time and space requirements for an exhaustive all-pair pre-computation have been reduced from O(N3

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: GIS
• Authors: Songhua Xing, Cyrus Shahabi
• Keywords: Automated Reasoning, Earth Visualization Tools, GIS 2010, Prohibitive Time Complexity, Shortest Surface Paths