Reconstructing land's appearance

Abstract

An important and largely area of computer image generation is that related with geographic information. Geographic data can be used for analysis, design and evaluation in natural-resource assessment, regional planning, and large-area landscape design. While Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has focused on delivering traditional cartographic representations, some people demands others aspects be covered: the use of "appropiate" representations to help viewers to understand the information. This is the case of the visualization of the land's topography and how the changes on it affect its appearance. Strangely, the combination of GIS and visualization area still remains unexplored. The elds seem to complement on another, yet they have developed in parallel and the interaction between them is important in providing usable interactive systems. This paper presents a visualization approach of a topographic surface spatially inter- polated from Topographic Reliefs. We hope this will help people with no background in scientific visualization orient themselves to the image.