Measuring Terrain Information Using Multifractal and Wavelets in Terrain Navigation

Terrain navigation extracts navigation information from terrain with respect to the aircraft flight path, and the accuracy is not the same when the terrain underneath the path is different. Generally, the rougher the terrain is, the more terrain information it contains. In practical use, we require a precise measure of the terrain information of the area, in order to evaluate the navigation algorithm and make the flight route planning. We introduce a novel approach, in which DEM is seen as 2D planar projection of the topographic surface and the singularity exponent, which is defined in multifractal theory, is used as the measure of terrain information and is calculated using wavelet transform. This method can obtain terrain information of each point of the terrain and the result is scale-invariant.