Except for unmaintained tracks, road construction involves local terrain modifications. The job of the image understanding component is to confirm the hypothesized presence of terrain features and refine positional estimates, rather than perform a bottom-up extraction of the features themselves. The restricted nature of this task allows the use of simple and reliable image analysis methods that are tolerant of wide variability in input data. Embankments are terrain features that critically affect the realism of ground warfare simulations. They provide concealment while also constituting potential barriers to traversibility.
Great difficulty is associated with accurately extracting embankments from source data.
Embankments are long, narrow features with a width typically much smaller that the spatial resolution of the terrain data used to construct geospatial databases. While embankments are often apparent in high resolution aerial imagery, reliable detection is difficult and the visual signature of an embankment is easily confused with other commonly occurring terrain and cultural features. We will take in source data and available intermediate results of the original modeling process, apply our methods, and insert the additional extracted features into the original model. This will allow users of the simulation to interact with before and after versions of the terrain model, providing us with an evaluation of the changes to realism and utility that result. While quantitative evaluation is useful in many instances, in this case we believe the most effective evaluation will come with the user acceptance of the simulated world built from the supplementary data.