Abstract:

It is a fundamental problem on how to obtain more accurate and integral structural characteristics from Digital Elevation Model (DEM) as possible in geoinformatics. This paper presented a new method as Terrain-Characteristic Hyper-Relationship (TCHR), which is based on mathematical hypergraph and terrain characteristic logical relationship. Hypergraph's edge in finite-set theory is defined to contain uncertain number of vertices. Based on hypergraph, DEM and its characteristic data can be formed into two hyper-classes, and characteristic line can be treated as the certain number of orderly vertices’sub-set additionally with its other properties. It is available to build a new idea for characteristic extraction based on the logic hyper-relationship between DEM and local area's structure characteristic. Thus method is proved to be useful to obtain more integrated and correct characteristic lines from the grid DEM.

Key words: hypergraph, digital elevation model, terrain characteristic hyper relationship (TCHR), characteristic extraction