Human-Goal-Based Approach to the Analysis and Processing of Visibility Data

摘要

Despite the great amount of research devoted to the visibility problem, very little attention has been devoted so far to measure or compare visibility data in a way which is consistent with 'human-based' goals, as of interest in typical military applications. In fact, terrains are usually compared using mathematical norms which are unable to measure distances in terms of their visibility properties. The objective of this report is to introduce a functional-theoretic framework to deal with the notion of visibility and develop mathematically well-defined and practically effective tools to process visibility information, including the comparison, analysis and classification of visibility data. In particular, a new notion of difference of visibility distance is introduced, as a theoretical and computational tool for the comparison of terrain models from the point of their visibility properties.