Automated Fusion of Digital Elevation Models

Recent years have seen the increasing availability of digitalelevation model (DEM) data, due to the introduction of new sensorsystems such as LIDAR, IFSAR, and SRTM, and also to wider distributionmade possible by the Internet. Military applications of DEM datainclude training, visualization, and route planning, while civilapplications include flood plain mapping, environmental monitoring,and land use planning.This project will address current DEM utilization limitations bydeveloping an extensive toolset for DEM manipulation which willsupport 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 visualizationof geospatial data, which has a large user base. We will alsoimplement plug-ins for the ESRI ARC packages and to ERDAS Imagine,since these systems are widely used in government and civilianapplications. These plug-ins will be based on the COM (Common ObjectModel) architecture, which will reduce the integration effort requiredand allow their use with other COTS systems, if required.Proved utilization of multiple DEMs by Government and civilian users.