Research On Modeling Terrain Morphology And Its Application Based On Morse Complex

Terrain description and representation is one of the key research issues for the disciplines such asgeoscience and geomatics. As an accurate geometric description, Digital Elevation Model (DEM)can not directly reveal the feature information of the terrain surface, and sometimes may carry alarge amount of data redundancy, while the surface topological data structure can provide acompact description for terrain. To this aim, some issues about modelling the terrain morphologyand its application into the simplification of regular square grid are discussed in details based on theMorse complex in this paper. The primary contents include as following: an improved and universalalgorithm is proposed to prevent the intersections between ridge and ravine at regular points, whichis induced by the traditional algorithms. Furthermore, this algorithm is extended to construct themorphology of the earth surface, and the difference of modelling method is compared between theglobal and local terrain morphology. On the other hand, a novel method of selecting the terrainsignificant points based on the topological hierarchies is presented for regular square grid, and theoptimization strategy is discussed for the algorithmic efficiency. In the end, A prototype system isdesigned and developed to validate the correctness and feasibility as well as the effect of theproposed algorithms taking advantage of the GTOPO30and SRTM elevation data.