System with Intelligent Editing for Extracting Ridge and Ravine Terrain Features

摘要

We describe a system for extracting ridges and ravines from elevation data. The application context is a map-based military planning tool, which allows users to select ridges and ravines by simple mouse clicks. The extracted terrain features are complete in the application-specific sense that they conform to what our users expect a single ridge or ravine to look like. Supervision is supported by a graphical user interface, which allows an analyst to modify algorithm parameters as well as perform intelligent mouse-based editing operations. Among similar existing systems, ours is unique in that it focuses on the three classically difficult operations of (1) combining partial features, (2) splitting multiply-connected features, and (3) removing micro- terrain features for extracting high-level structure from classical pixels.