Terrain reconstruction with an adaptive surface mesh

This paper describes a new class of adaptive mesh surface for terrain analysis. The novelty of the contribution resides in the control of the mesh. We use a variance-bias criterion to select the optimal areas for the triangular facets of the mesh.In this way the mesh adapts itself to o er the best tradeo between increasing the facet area to minimise the noise variance and deccreasing the facet area to minimise the bias of the tted facet parameters. We provide a illustration of the e ectiveness of the new mesh control methodology for the case where the faces of the mesh represent planar patches. The piecewise planar mesh is shown to be e ective in the modelling of an area of complex terrain structure in Southern England.