Jon Todd

I presented my talk on scalable raster to TIN simplification at the FOSS4G2006 conference in Lausanne Switzerland on 9/19/2006. The talk covered my work with Prof. Laura Toma from my honors project at Bowdoin as well as work done the summer after graduating. You can download the pdf version of both the paper and the talk here:

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conference paper
conference talk
full paper

Overview:

Essentially my research explorers the differences representing data using a Triangulated Irregular Network (TIN) instead of a raster (grid) to represent a set of points. More specifically we looked at digital elevation models or DEMs and found that in most cases TINs provided much more space efficiency after implementing a raster to TIN simplification algorithm and performing imperial tests. Furthermore, we made the algorithm scalable. That is to say that for extremely large input files we see no degradation in performance.

While most of the GIS community operates on grids because they are easy to work with and more common, it is our belief that eventually a more efficient means of representation will be needed and TINs provide a viable solution.

Our work has been made available for the open source GIS community through GRASS in a package called r.refine.