Enhanced cartographic representation of contour lines derived from point clouds in flat areas preserving the vertical error

Abstract

The paper introduces a new method producing an enhanced cartographic representation of contour lines derived from 3D point cloud. The method brings improvement namely in flat areas, preserving the given vertical error, reducing the artificial oscillations and is applicable to topographic maps of large scales.

The proposed method has complexity of O(N2). Extensive cartographic testing was performed.

The results on large point sets and statistical assessment are presented together with a comparison with the contour lines created by cartographic experts.

Keywords

• Contour lines
• topographic maps
• simplification
• generalization
• smoothing
• digital cartography
• point clouds
• 3D