A Compression Algorithm for Managing Digital Elevation Models in Mobile Devices

Nowadays, there are many applications such as disaster mitigation, surveying or geology-support, and others where Digital Elevation Models (DEM) are useful in the field. DEM typically requires a huge amount of data, making the tasks of DEM transmission over a wireless network or storing and displaying it in a mobile device very complex. These tasks are important challenges in computer science research. Up-to-date, the compression techniques are used to compress DEMs with a high compression coefficient, nevertheless, whether the user requires to access the file or to obtain certain information about the raster data, it is necessary to decompress the entire DEM file. In consequence, these approaches are not well suited for applications focused on devices with limited hardware resources. In this paper, a novel compression/decompression technique is presented. This approach is capable of obtaining the specific parameters such as altitudes and contour lines of a sub-region of the DEM without using a full decompression stage. A detailed analysis of the properties and complexity of our approach is presented.