Sea Floor Bathymetry Trackline Surface Fitting Without Visible Artifacts Using ODETLAP

High quality, artifact-free fitting a bathymetry (sea-floor) surface to very unevenly spaced depth data from ship tracklines is possible with ODETLAP (Overdetermined Laplacian Partial Differential Equation). The problem is that many data points, but with imprecise values, can be collected along and near the ships, e.g., with Multibeam Bathymetry, but there are no data between the tracklines, which may be a considerable distance apart. The numerous artifacts of previous surface fitting algorithms were so totally unacceptable that even Photoshop has been used to smooth them. In contrast, the implementation of this version of ODETLAP generates surfaces that do not exhibit artifacts even when displayed with techniques that highlight minor slope irregularities, which is, in the authors' opinion, the most appropriate evaluation metric. Since the data is imprecise, ODETLAP's surface approximates, rather than interpolates, the data. ODETLAP can trade off smoothness and accuracy to c...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: GIS
• Authors: Tsz-Yam Lau, W. Randolph Franklin, You Li, Zhongyi Xie
• Keywords: Database, Depth Data, GIS 2009, Surface Fitting Algorithms, Variable Smoothness Parameter