MULTIRESOLUTION MODELS FOR TOPOGRAPHIC SURFACE DESCRIPTION

Multiresolution terrain models describe topographic surface at various levels of resolution. Besides providing a data compression mechanism for dense topographic data, such models enable us to analyze and visua lize surfaces at a variable resolution. This paper provides a critical survey of multiresolution terrain models. Formal definitions of hiera rchical and pyramidal models are presented. Multiresolution models pro posed in the literature (namely, surface quadtree, restricted quadtree , quaternary triangulation, ternary triangulation, adaptive hierarchic al triangulation, hierarchical Delaunay triangulation, and pyramid) ar e described and within such frameworks. Construction algorithms for al l such models are given, together with an analysis of their time and s pace complexities.