HiPDERL: An Improved Implementation of the PDERL Viewshed Algorithm and Accuracy Analysis

Abstract

Terrain viewshed analysis based on the digital elevation model (DEM) is of significant application value. A lot of viewshed analysis algorithms have been proposed, including R3 as the accurate one and others as efficient ones. The R3 algorithm is accurate because of its comprehensive but time-consuming computation, while the others are efficient due to proper approximation. However, no algorithm is capable of taking advantage of both until one algorithm is proposed, which is based on a ‘proximity-direction-elevation’ (PDE) coordinate system and named the PDE spatial reference line (PDERL) algorithm. The original research proves the PDERL algorithm is perfectly accurate by theory and experimental results, in comparison with R3 as standard, and even more efficient than R3. However, the original research does not mention the cases where the observer is placed on grid points, and the original implementation does not produce very accurate results in practice. It is important to find out and correct the errors. In this paper, a checking algorithm for PDERL is proposed to allow further investigation of errors. With the fundamental ideas of PDERL unchallenged, an improved implementation of the PDERL algorithm is proposed, named HiPDERL. By experimental results, this paper proves HiPDERL utilizes the potential of PDERL on accuracy at the cost of a little efficiency when the observer is placed on grid points.