AUTOMATED SMALL-SCALE RELIEF SHADING: A NEW METHOD AND SOFTWARE APPLICATION

Anna M. LEONOWICZ, Bernhard JENNY

ABSTRACT: Shaded relief derived from high-resolution terrain models often contains distracting terrain details that need to be removed for medium and small scale mapping. This paper introduces Terrain Sculptor, a software application that prepares generalized terrain models for relief shading. The application uses a generalization methodology based on a succession of raster operations. Terrain Sculptor offers a graphical user interface to adjust the algorithm to various scales and terrain resolutions. The freeware application is available at http://www.terraincartography.com/terrainsculptor/.

Keywords: Relief shading, Terrain Sculptor, graphic user interface.

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