Recent years have seen the increasing availability of digital elevation model (DEM) data, due to the introduction of new sensor systems such as LIDAR, IFSAR, and SRTM, and also to wider distribution made possible by the Internet. Military applications of DEM data include training, visualization, and route planning, while civil applications include flood plain mapping, environmental monitoring, and land use planning. This project will address current DEM utilization limitations by developing an extensive toolset for DEM manipulation which will support filtering, coordinate transformation, registration, resampling, and fusion in an automated process flow. The toolset will be delivered as plug-ins to three commercial systems. The first target will be \terratools, our system for the visualization of geospatial data, which has a large user base. We will also implement plug-ins for the ESRI ARC packages and to ERDAS Imagine, since these systems are widely used in government and civilian applications. These plug-ins will be based on the COM (Common Object Model) architecture, which will reduce the integration effort required and allow their use with other COTS systems, if required. Proved utilization of multiple DEMs by Government and civilian users.
Keywords: Dem, Cartography, Fusion, Terrain
