Representations and Metrics for Time-Varying Terrain Surfaces
Abstract
Terrain analyses such as line-of-sight queries, trafficability, penetrability, and change feature detection are fundamental components of modern battlefield information technology. In real-time decision making, the delay in computing these analyses on higher resolution representations must be balanced against the fidelity of the calculated results. This requires time-varying terrain models with multiple selectable resolutions and with measures of uncertainty due to data collection and data approximation. The reported work makes significant contributions to research in terrain metrics and efficient computations that provide this capability. We develop several time varying data structures that incorporate terrain uncertainty measures. This includes representations for the extracted, time-varying change features and ways to access these features for meaningful exploration, understanding, and use. One interactive system uses a time-varying, multi-resolution 2D rasters and a coordinated 3D mesh. A second off-line system uses a probabilistic volumetric structure with a extractable mesh that can be incrementally augmented over time. A third interactive system integrates 3D terrain mesh visualization with a coordinated, feature-space 2D visualization.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Aug 06, 2013
- Accession Number
- ADA595122
Entities
People
- William Ribarsky
- Zachary Wartell
Organizations
- University of North Carolina at Charlotte