The Robotics Institute

Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

Copyright notice: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Abstract

Some applications such as the autonomous navigation in natural terrain and the automation of map making process require high-level scene descriptions as well as geometrical representation of the natural terrain environments. In this paper, we present methods for building high level terrain descriptions, referred to as topographic maps, by extracting terrain features like "peaks," "pits," "ridges," and "ravines" from the contour map. The resulting topographic map contains the location and type of terrain features as well as the ground topography. We present new algorithms for extracting topographic maps consisting of topographic features (peaks, pits, ravines, and ridges) and contour maps. We develop new definitions for those topographic features based on the contour map. We build a contour map from an elevation map and generate the connectivity tree of all regions separated by the contours. We use this connectivity tree, called a topographic change tree, to extract the topographic features. Experimental results on a digital elevation model (DEM) supports our definitions for topographic features and the approach.

Notes

Associated Center(s) / Consortia: Vision and Autonomous Systems Center

Text Reference

In So Kweon and Takeo Kanade, "Extracting Topographic Terrain Features from Elevation Maps," Journal of Computer Vision, Graphics and Image Processing: Image Understanding, Vol. 59, No. 2, March, 1994, pp. 171-182.

BibTeX Reference

@article{Kweon_1994_1676,
   author = "In So Kweon and Takeo Kanade",
   journal = "Extracting Topographic Terrain Features from Elevation Maps",
   booktitle = "Journal of Computer Vision, Graphics and Image Processing: Image Understanding",
   pages = "171-182",
   month = "March",
   year = "1994",
   volume = "59",
   number = "1",
}

The Robotics Institute

Menu