Automated Interpretation of Topographic Maps.

摘要

Some new results which impact favorably upon the issue of automated topographic map interpretation are presented. Actually, the 'new' results consist of heretofore undiscovered applications of two concepts known to mathematicians and computer scientists for many years: binary search, and the normal vector. Binary search is extended by the technique from not only one to two dimensions, but arguably to three dimensions, since topographical maps are two-dimensional representations of three dimensional surfaces. Such maps are essentially sorted hierarchies of nested contours, which form a multiply-connected subdivision of the plane. The perimeter of a subdivision element is defined by a set of contours of extremal elevation and the edges of the map; a naming convention attaches a label to each element of the planar subdivision. Whenever one is afforded the luxury of dealing with a sorted data structure, one may invoke the power of binary search to achieve 0 (log n) time complexity during processing of a topographical query, where n is the number of contours which comprise a specific element of the planar subdivision. A topographical query is a request by a user to interpret the position of an arbitrary map coordinate, called query point, topographic map background. Artificial Intelligence, Applied Mathematics, Data Fusion, Topographic Line Map (TLM).