A high-accuracy method for filling voids and its verification

Abstract

A new method for filling voids is developed by improving the approach to high- accuracy surface modelling (HASM), which is based on the first fundamental coefficients and the second fundamental coefficients of surfaces. The first fundamental coefficients are used to calculate the lengths of curves, angles of tangent vectors, areas of regions and geodesics on the surface. The second fundamental coefficients reflect the local warping of the surface, namely its deviation from the tangent plane at the point under consideration, which can be observed from outside the Earth. Nine regions with different landform complexities in hilly, plateau and mountainous areas are selected for testing the performance of HASM by comparing those ones of the classic methods such as triangulated irregular network (TIN), inverse distance weighted interpolation (IDW), advanced Spline method (ANUDEM), Spline and Kriging. The results demonstrated that the HASM void filling always has the highest accuracy regardless of the landform complexity, void area and auxiliary data.