Paulo Raposo
Engineering, manufacturing, and other disciplines variously make use of the concept of surface finish, which is the characterization and measurement of some object's surface relative to a perfect plane, typically at very fine, microscopic resolutions. In mechanical application, measurements of surface finish can help determine whether a part is suitable for use under a certain amount of pressure or friction, for example. Surface finish defines three general parameters:
lay: predominant, directional patterns in a surface.
surface roughness: the amount of irregularities in a surface.
waviness: the amount of surface irregularities in a surface occurring at a larger scale than roughness.
Terrain represented in DEMs is commonly measured in terms of various landscape parameters, being geometric measurements of the forms in the data; some of these are slope, roughness, topographic position index, and openness.
DEMs also sometimes contain significant errors and processing artefacts, which can sometimes occur in regular patterns, such as stripes or grids.
The goal of this project is to compare surface finish measurements to either, or both, of landscape parameters and DEM artefacts, to explore whether surface finish analysis can provide insight on landforms or DEM data quality.
This project will combine techniques from engineering and manufacturing with geospatial analysis of digital elevation models (DEMs); the goal is to explore whether the concepts of lay, roughness, and waviness from the analysis of surface finish can meaningfully analyse or evaluate raster geospatial relief data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_finish
Wechsler, Suzanne P., and Charles N. Kroll. 2006. “Quantifying DEM Uncertainty and Its Effect on Topographic Parameters.” Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing 72(9):1081–90.
Jenny, Bernhard. 2020. “Terrain Generalization with Line Integral Convolution.” Cartography and Geographic Information Science 0(0):1–15. doi: 10.1080/15230406.2020.1833762.