Abstract
In cities and other human activity areas, the implementation of various ground projects has resulted in significant changes in natural surface morphology, a prominent feature of which is the formation of a variety of discontinuous terrains, such as roads and building basements. In the process of DEM modeling of these landforms, traditional modeling methods produce obvious topographic distortions at topographic prominences, which limits the application depth of DEMs in these areas. To solve these problems, this paper proposes a DEM modeling method to enhance the expression of discontinuous terrain from the perspective of simplicity and convenience for application. The method is based on terrain data such as topographic feature lines, altimetric points, and contour lines. First, parallel feature lines are generated according to a certain distance. Then, vertices are inserted into the topographic feature line and the parallel feature line according to the specified step length, and the known altimetric points are selected from both sides of the original topographic feature line to estimate the height value of the vertices. Finally, by combining the topographic feature line, parallel feature line and other available topographic data for TIN construction, the result can effectively express the special topography of discontinuous terrain. In this study, a region in Nanjing City, Jiangsu Province, China, was selected as the study area to conduct a DEM construction experiment. The experimental results showed that the DEM constructed by this method could well express the morphological characteristics of discontinuous terrain, and the height accuracy of the construction results was also significantly improved compared with that of the conventional method.