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Flooding Triangulated Terrain

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Abstract

We extend pit filling and basin hierarchy computation to TIN terrain models. These operations are relatively easy to implement in drainage computations based on networks (e.g., raster D8 or Voronoi dual) but robustness issues make them difficult to implement in an otherwise appealing model of water flow on a continuous surface such as a TIN. We suggest a consistent solution of the robustness issues, then augment the basin hierarchy graph with different functions for how basins fill and spill to simplify the watershed graph to the essentials. Our solutions can be tuned by choosing a small number of intuitive parameters to suit applications that require a data-dependent selection of basin hierarchies.

Research partially supported by NSF grant 9988742.

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© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Liu, Y., Snoeyink, J. (2005). Flooding Triangulated Terrain. In: Developments in Spatial Data Handling. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-26772-7_11

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