Volume from Outlines on Terrains

Abstract

Outlines (closed loops) delineate areas of interest on terrains, such as regions with a heightened risk of landslides. For various analysis tasks it is necessary to define and compute a volume of earth (soil) based on such an outline, capturing, for example, the possible volume of a landslide in a high-risk region. In this paper we discuss several options to define meaningful 2D surfaces induced by a 1D outline, which allow us to compute such volumes. We experimentally compare the proposed surface options for two applications: similarity of paths on terrains and landslide susceptibility analysis. 2012 ACM Subject Classification Information systems → Geographic information systems; Theory of computation → Computational geometry