Multiple Observer Siting on Terrain with Intervisibility or Lo-res Data

We describe two current projects with our toolkit for siting multiple observers on terrain. (Both observers and targets are at some specified height above ground level. Observers can see targets, when not hidden by the terrain, out to a specified radius of interest.) Siting the observers so that they are intervisible, i.e., so that the visibility graph is a connected set, is the first project. The second project tests the effect, on the optimality of the multiple observer siting (w/o intervisiblity), of reducing the map cell’s horizontal or vertical resolution. We lowered the resolution, sited observers optimally, then computed those observers’ joint visibility index on the hi-res data. We observed that much less precise vertical resolution is ok, but that reducing the horizontal resolution by even a factor of two leads to an observer siting with significantly reduced joint visibility index, when evaluated on the hi-res data. Applications of multiple observer siting include siting radio towers and mitigating visual nuisances.