Multi-Digital Terrain Modeling and Fusion for Environmental Analysis

Written to address the need for updated, precise, and continuous representation of our topography, this book discusses a new approach for georelated environmental analyses processes, mainly fusion, that simultaneously handles different existing topographic databases. It enables a more true-to-nature handling of digital models representing our natural environment. The book outlines in detail the developed methodology and its different algorithms and implementations, and discusses the cases of when to use it, and how, along with statistical and visual detailing. Authors investigate and analyze real case studies and applications, and list the full algorithmic structures needed in the process.

Introduction
DTM generation - acquisition and production technologies
DTM representation - data types, data structures, and data interpolation techniques
Accuracy and reliability estimation and characteristics of DTMs
Visualization issues related to DTMs
Methodology and algorithms related to the hierarchical fusion approach
Defining and presenting the needs of fusing multi-sources; stating the difficulties
Presenting current scientific state of dealing with this task
Presenting the methodology and concepts
First working level - global
Skeletal structure establishment - interest point identification and extraction
Spatial registration - forward Hausdorff distance algorithm
Second working level - local
Non-rigid bodies spatial geometric matching
Various data structures: Grid, TIN, Geographic-mesh
Third working level - position-derived
Interpolation concepts and algorithms
Reverse-engineering interpolation and fusion
Geo-oriented applications for environmental analysis and control processes - statistical and visual evaluation, and case-study analysis and presentation
Summary and conclusions
SWOT analysis
Future development and applications
Final remarks