DIGITAL TERRAIN MODELING Principles and Methodology

Preface of the Book

Terrain models have always appealed to military personnel, planners, landscape architects, civil engineers, as well as other experts in various earth sciences. Originally, terrain models were physical models, made of rubber, plastic, clay, sand, etc. Since the later 1950s, the computer has been introduced into this area and the modeling of terrain surface has since then been carried out numerically or digitally, leading to the current discipline — digital terrain modeling.

Digital terrain modeling is a process to obtain desirable models of the land surface. Such models have found wide applications, since its origin in the late 1950s, in various disciplines such as mapping, remote sensing, civil engineering, mining engineering, geology, geomorphology, military engineering, land planning, and communications. Therefore, digital terrain modeling has become a discipline receiving increasing attention.

It is encouraging that more literature is now available in this discipline. After 30 years of development, the first book in this area, entitled Terrain Modelling in Surveying and Civil Engineering, was published by Whittles Publishing in 1990, which was edited by Prof. G. Petrie of Glasgow University together with his former student Tom Kennie. This book has been serving as the text book in this area since its publication. On the other hand, as one could imagine, some of the materials in this book have become outdated during another 10 years of rapid development. A revision of this book was desirable. This became difficult after the retirement of Prof. Petrie and Tom Kennie’s leaving of the academic community.

Therefore, Zhilin Li, as a former Ph.D. student of Prof. G. Petrie at Glasgow University, felt obliged to do something. He talked to Qing Zhu of Wuhan University and decided to write a book. In 2000, a book entitled Digital Elevation Model was written in Chinese and published by the then Wuhan Technical University of Surveying and Mapping Press (now Wuhan University Press). 

This book was largely based on some of the materials from the Ph.D. thesis of Zhilin Li (1990) and the research work of both Zhilin and Qing, thus some traditional topics such as contouring and interpolation are either very simplified or completely neglected. 

This book has been well received in China and is widely used as a textbook for postgraduate students in geo-information.
As a result, Zhilin and Qing were presented an “Excellent Textbook Award” (second prize) by the Ministry of Education of China in 2002.

However, the omission of some traditional topics made it deficient as a textbook and there was an urgent need for a revision of this book. At that critical moment, Chris Gold joined the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 2000 and became a colleague of Zhilin. This presented Zhilin and Qing with a golden opportunity to cooperate with Chris not only to revise the book but also to produce an English edition. Chris happily accepted an offer to be one of the coauthors as he has been working in terrain modeling using triangulation and Voronoi diagrams for nearly 30 years and had a lot of materials to be included. As a result, the current English edition is produced, which is indeed more a rewritten book than a revised version

This book contains 15 chapters. Apart from the introduction, Chapters 2 and 3 are about sampling and data acquisition. Chapters 4 to 6 are about the theories, methods, and algorithms for digital terrain modeling. Chapters 7 and 8 are on quality control and accuracy of digital terrain modeling. Chapters 9 to 12 are about presentation of DTMs, in databases, in contour form and in other forms of computer graphics.

Chapters 13 and 14 are about interpretation and applications. Chapter 15 discusses some extensions of digital terrain models for specific problems, to present an opinion on where the research in this area will lead. Chapters 9, 11, and 15 are newly added to make the original edition more complete. There are major revisions in all other chapters.

As the authors of this book, we are pleased to present you with this volume. However, we must do justice to the many who have contributed to the various earlier versions. We appreciate Prof. G. Petrie’s assistance to Zhilin while writing his Ph.D. dissertation. 

We would like to express our thanks to Valerie Gold (Chris’s wife) for editing the language; to Prof. D. Li of Wuhan University for his encouragement of the writing of this book; to a number of our students for producing some of the diagrams; and to the publisher for making this volume available to you. We hope you like it. Last but not the least, we would also like to thank Lingyun Liu, Yijun Zhang, and Valerie Gold (i.e., our wives) for their support.

 Z. Li, Q. Zhu, and C. Gold

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DIGITAL TERRAIN MODELING Principles and Methodology