Image compression terrain simplification

Surface simplification is an important application in geographic information systems. The goal is to obtain a new surface that is combinatorially as simple as possible, while maintaining a prescribed degree of similarity with the original input surface. In this paper, we propose a new terrain simplification algorithm which is based on known Digital Image Processing compression methods (e.g. DCT, wavelets compression) that was specially adjusted to fit Digital Elevation Models. DEM-images are terrains or elevation maps represented as gray scale images. We investigate the special nature of such terrain-images and design a unique pre-compression process which defines the parameters to guide the image compression. We perform a large-scale experiment comparing several terrain simplification methods and conclude that the new suggested algorithm (named ICTS¹) leads to significantly better compression results.