This paper reports a methodology for inferring terrain parameters from estimated terrain forces in order to allow wheeled autonomous vehicles to assess mobility in real-time. Terrain force estimation can be used to infer the ability to accelerate, climb, or tow a load independent of the underlying terrain model. When a terrain model is available, physical soil properties and stress distribution...

A LIDAR filtering technique is used to differentiate on-terrain points and off-terrain points from a cloud of 3-D point data collected by a LIDAR system. A major issue of concern in this low-level filter is to design a methodology to have a continual adaptation to terrain surface variations. To this end, several essential observations are discussed in this paper: i) the terrain surface can be f...

In this paper, we report a geospatial assessment of the selected mine sites in the Plateau State, Nigeria. The aim of this work is to determine the impact of mining on the terrain as well as the Land Use/Land Cover (LULC) of the host communities. The Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission (SRTM) is used for the terrain mapping. The derived impact of mining on LULC between 1975 and 2014 is determined...

Digital terrain visualization has received increasing research interest in recent years. One main problem focus has been the large size of terrain data, which needs to be stored on secondary storage hence causing a performance slow-down in terrain visualization. This paper surveys secondary storage terrain visualization techniques with a particular focus on spatial database systems supporting t...

Shaded relief derived from high-resolution terrain models often contains distracting terrain details that need to be removed for medium and small scale mapping. This paper introduces Terrain Sculptor, a software application that prepares generalized terrain models for relief shading. The application uses a generalization methodology based on a succession of raster operations. Terrain Sculptor o...

The scale dependence of benthic terrain attributes is well-accepted, and multi-scale methods are increasingly applied for habitat mapping. There are, however, multiple ways to calculate at scales, the suitability these approaches depends on purpose analysis data characteristics. currently few guidelines establishing appropriateness raster calculation specific mapping applications. First, we ide...

Dynamic terrain is the ability to modify a terrain database in real-time. In the past, effects such as explosions did not alter the surface topology of the terrain by creating craters. The tracks and tires from vehicles did not leave ruts in areas with soft soil. This limited the training value of ground-based visual simulation systems. Dynamic terrain has become an increasingly important requi...