Parallel ODETLAP for terrain compression and reconstruction

We introduce a parallel approximation of an Over-determined Laplacian Partial Differential Equation solver (ODETLAP) applied to the compression and restoration of terrain data used for Geographical Information Systems (GIS). ODETLAP can be used to reconstruct a compressed elevation map, or to generate a dense regular grid from airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) point cloud data. With previous methods, the time to execute ODETLAP does not scale well with the size of the input elevation map, resulting in running times that are prohibitively long for large data sets. Our algorithm divides the data set into patches, runs ODETLAP on each patch, and then merges the patches together. This method gives two distinct speed improvements. First, we provide scalability by reducing the complexity such that the execution time grows almost linearly with the size of the input, even when run on a single processor. Second, we are able to calculate ODETLAP on the patches concurrently in a paral...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: GIS
• Authors: Jared Stookey, Zhongyi Xie, Barbara Cutler, W. Randolph Franklin, Daniel M. Tracy, Marcus V. A. Andrade
• Keywords: Compressed Elevation Map, Database, GIS 2008, Input Elevation Map, Terrain Elevation Data