Abstract
In light of the increased availability of massive point cloud data,
acquired by advanced remote sensing techniques, software tools for their
efficient representation and processing are needed. Triangulated
Irregular Networks (TINs) are an effective way to represent point clouds
without the need to interpolate them into raster-based terrain models.
However, GISs tools have limited support for TINs due to large storage
costs. For this reason, we present the Terrain Trees Library (TTL), a
library for terrain analysis based on a new scalable data structure
named Terrain trees. A Terrain tree relies on a hierarchical spatial
index where each leaf block encodes the minimum amount of connectivity
information for the TIN. Connectivity relations among the elements of
the TIN are extracted locally within each leaf block at run-time and
discarded when no longer needed. Moreover, the hierarchical domain
decomposition makes the library well-suited for parallel processing. TTL
contains a kernel for connectivity and spatial queries, and modules for
extracting morphological features, including edge and triangle slopes,
roughness, curvature. It also contains modules for extracting
topological structures, like critical point, critical net, watershed
segmentation, based on the discrete Morse gradient, and a technique for
multivariate data visualization, which enables the analysis of multiple
scalar fields defined on the same terrain. To evaluate the effectiveness
and scalability of TTL, we compared it against the most compact
state-of-the-art data structure for TINs, the IA data structure. When
encoded by Terrain trees, a TIN requires 36% less storage than when
encoded by the IA data structure. Beyond this storage reduction, Terrain
trees also show better performance than the IA data structure in most
terrain analysis operations. This speedup is obtained since Terrain
trees enable 57% to 72% faster extraction of the triangles incident in
a vertex. Extracting the triangles incident in vertices as well as the
adjacent vertices on the mesh is a key task in most terrain feature
extraction operations on a TIN. Using Terrain trees, we achieved 36% to
55% less time consumption computing morphological features and 20%
less time consumption computing the discrete Morse gradient than using
the IA data structure.