An application of Coons patch to generate grid-based digital elevation models

Abstract

We have presented a new method for generating grid-based digital elevation models (DEMs) based on Coons patch. A series of Gaussian synthetic surfaces with various surface complexities were employed to comparatively analyze the simulation accuracies of Coons patch and the classical interpolation methods, such as IDW, Natural neighbor, SPLINE and KRIGING. Results indicate that irrespective of terrain complexity, Coons patch is much more accurate than the classical interpolation methods, and the accuracy of Coons patch is about 327.30, 15.19, 3.66 and 40.07 times as high as the accuracies of IDW, Natural neighbor, SPLINE and KRIGING on average. A real-world test area was used to test the effect of sampling density on the simulation accuracy. The results indicate that Coons patch has a higher accuracy than the classical interpolation methods regardless of sampling density. In a word, Coons patch as an accurate interpolation method can be used for grid-based DEM construction.