Terrain Prickliness: Theoretical Grounds for High Complexity Viewsheds

Abstract

An important task in terrain analysis is computing viewsheds. A viewshed is the union of all the parts of the terrain that are visible from a given viewpoint or set of viewpoints. The complexity of a viewshed can vary significantly depending on the terrain topography and the viewpoint position. In this work we study a new topographic attribute, the prickliness, that measures the number of local maxima in a terrain from all possible angles of view. We show that the prickliness effectively captures the potential of terrains to have high complexity viewsheds. We present near-optimal algorithms to compute it for TIN terrains, and efficient approximate algorithms for raster DEMs. We validate the usefulness of the prickliness attribute with experiments in a large set of real terrains.