Abstract: High resolution digital elevation models (DEM) are becoming increasingly available for use as source data during the process of creating synthetic environments to support simulation systems. Several data sets that provide elevation points corresponding to 1 meter intervals on the earth surface are now available. However, multiple transformations must often be applied to the raw source data before it is suitable for use by any simulation system. These transformations have an impact on the fidelity of the final (simulation) synthetic environment that is difficult to quantify. Further, intuition alone now supports any claim that higher resolution source data necessarily results in generation of higher fidelity simulation data as a product of the transformation process. This paper documents an attempt to measure fidelity differences in final simulation synthetic environments that can be directly attributed to the resolution of the source data. Specifically, several lower resolution DEM are generated from a single high resolution (1 meter horizontal spacing) source DEM and all are used as source data for TIN construction. Automated planning software is applied to each and used as a metric to measure TIN quality. !6
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