Abstract
For hydrologic applications, terrain models should have few local minima, and drainage lines should coincide with edges. We show that triangulating a set of points with elevations such that the number of local minima of the resulting terrain is minimized is NP-hard for degenerate point sets. The same result applies when there are no degeneracies for higher-order Delaunay triangulations. Two heuristics are presented to reduce the number of local minima for higher-order Delaunay triangulations, which start out with the Delaunay triangulation. We give efficient algorithms for their implementation, and test on real-world data how well they perform. We also study another desirable drainage characteristic, namely few valley components.
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de Kok, T., van Kreveld, M., Löffler, M. (2005). Generating Realistic Terrains with Higher-Order Delaunay Triangulations. In: Brodal, G.S., Leonardi, S. (eds) Algorithms – ESA 2005. ESA 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3669. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11561071_32
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11561071_32
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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