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Extraction of terrain ridge lines and valley lines based on agglomeration analysis of terrain points: a cluster analysis method

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Abstract

Terrain feature extraction is one of the critical issues in geographic information science. As important terrain feature lines, ridge lines and valley lines play an important role in hydrological analysis, terrain reconstruction and automatic integration of contour lines. But the extraction of terrain feature lines is complicated and time-consuming task. In this paper, a terrain feature line extraction method is proposed based on clustering technique. The terrain feature points are automatically extracted according to the agglomeration of terrain points, and the similar points are automatically identified according to the DBSCAN clustering algorithm. The points with high similarity are clustered along the direction of ridge or valley, and the whole terrain will be clustered into multiple sub-regions. The nearest sub-regions are found by calculating the minimum distance between these sub-regions, the adjacent sub-regions are connected orderly by their center line to obtain terrain feature lines. Compared with other methods, the cluster analysis method in this paper has simple process and high efficiency.

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Data availability

The terrain data and codes that support the findings of this study are available in figshare with the identififier doi:10.6084/m9.figshare.21078646.

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Funding

This work was partly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41930102, 41771411).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Information Construction Department, Jiangsu Open University, Nanjing, 210036, China

    Cheng Zhang

  2. School of Computer and Electronic Information, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, 210023, China

    Wanfeng Dou

  3. Jiangsu Intelligent Information Technology and Software Engineering Laboratory, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, 210023, China

    Wanfeng Dou & Yuan Pang

Authors
  1. Cheng Zhang
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  2. Wanfeng Dou
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  3. Yuan Pang
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Cheng Zhang, Wanfeng Dou and Yuan Pang. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Cheng Zhang. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Wanfeng Dou.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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Communicated by H. Babaie.

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Zhang, C., Dou, W. & Pang, Y. Extraction of terrain ridge lines and valley lines based on agglomeration analysis of terrain points: a cluster analysis method. Earth Sci Inform 16, 345–356 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12145-023-00943-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12145-023-00943-7

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