Reconstructing terrain maps from dense range data

This paper describes a method for combining multiple, dense range maps to create surface reconstructions of height functions. Height functions are relevant for application domains such as terrain modeling, where one 3D coordinate is function of the other two. Dense range maps are produced by either a range measuring device combined with a scanning mechanism or a triangulation scheme, such as active or passive stereo. The proposed method follows from a statistical formulation that is described in a previous work, but which is adapted for the problem at hand. For this application, optimal surface estimates are formulated as the solution to a second-order, nonlinear, partial differential equation (pde) on an image, and thus this work is related to the family of pde-based image processing algorithms in the literature