The Research On Algorithms To Calculate The Development Degree Of Goat Trail Landscape

Goat trails are widely distributed in arid and semi-arid of Loess Plateau hilly areas in China, which has a very important impact on soil erosion. Zou-Mei etc. have simulated the formation and development of goat trails with cellular automata. Their simulation results can be processed into binary images consist of bare land and vegetation. In their work, getting the degree of development of the goat trail landscape will be helpful for further experiments and analysis. In this paper, we present the concept of "vertical connectivity depth" used to characterize the degree of development of goat trail landscape. It defines a value called "vertical connectivity depth" for each pixel of the binary image as simulation result, which can be used to show the development degree of the goat trails landscape. We also present two algorithms to calculate the "vertical connectivity depth"——the algorithm called "Depth Diffusion" and the algorithm based on connected component labeling. The Depth Diffusion algorithm calculates the "vertical connectivity depth" through simalating the pressure distribution of fluid, which is simple and easy to implement. The algorithm based on connected component labeling needs to find out each connected component in the images and then calculates the depth value of each pixel. The experiment results show that both of the two algorithms can calculate the result correctly. The algorithm based on connected component labeling has an advantage on stability and disadvantage on excuting time compared with depth diffusion algorithm which is 20-times faster than it. But the running time of "Depth Diffusion" algorithm may increases exponentially over time.