Digital Terrain Analysis

People have a living on the surface of earth and have some relation with terrain everywhere. According to the importance of terrain information on the area of geology, terrain, hydrography, monitoring natural disaster, investigating natural resources and so on, human have set out to research how to achieve, express, manage and analyse terrain information since long ago. At the same time, these problems are the important areas of the surveying and mapping. Digital terrain analysis is a frame that integrates terrain data into terrain analysis. The main idea includes: the computation of basic terrain factor, the abstraction of terrain characteristics, the analysis of visualization, water system features and road, etc.Digital terrain analysis is one of the hot research area on the field of digital elevation applications. Based on the thorough inverstigation on the current terrain analysis, we propose an approach in theory and key technology of digital terrain analysis. We firstly introduce the growth of theory and the research production of digital terrain expression, then analysize the theory base and approach, and select a suitable theory/approach in order to solve the difficulty in the field. There are some related definition and some algorithm about how to gain and generate terrain data in the thesis. We mainly analyse digital terrain, which includes the computation of basic terrain factor and the abstraction of terrain characteristics. Terrain factor is introduced around the definition, the mathematics expression and the abstraction algorithm, etc. Furthermore, we have a deeply research on the analysis in the generation of gradient factor, the error and the comparation among different kinds of algorithm. We improve on the algorithm of the generation of gradient factor. At last, we discuss terrain visualization due to the practicability of digital terrain analysis.