An Adaptive Method of High Accuracy Surface Modeling and Its Application to Simulating Elevation Surfaces

An adaptive method is employed to speed up computation of high accuracy surface modeling (HASM), for which an error indicator and an error estimator are developed. Root mean-square error (RMSE) is used as the error estimator that is formulated as a function of gully density and grid cell size. The error indicator is developed on the basis of error surfaces for different spatial resolutions, which are interpolated in terms of the absolute errors calculated at sampled points while paying attention to the landform characteristics. The error surfaces indicate the magnitude and distribution of errors in each step of adaptive refinement and make spatial changes to the errors in the simulation process visualized. The adaptive method of high accuracy surface modeling (HASM-AM) is applied to simulating elevation surface of the Dong-Zhi tableland with 27.24 million pixels at a spatial resolution of 10 m ¥ 10 m. Test results show that HASM-AM has greatly speeded up computation by avoiding unnecessary calculations and saving memory. In addition, HASM-AM improves simulation accuracy.tgis_1213 615..630 Address for correspondence: Tian-Xiang Yue, Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research, 100101 Beijing, China. E-mail: [email protected] Transactions in GIS, 2010, 14(5): 615–630 © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9671.2010.01213.x