Abstract of Thesis presented at COPPE/UFRJ as a partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science (M.Sc.)

Modeling of Natural Terrain Through Triangular Meshes

Anderson Patury Sangreman

April/2014

Advisor:

Ramon Romankevicius Costa

Department:

Eletrical Engineering

      In this work we present a method for modeling natural terrain covered by vegetation. The model construction is made from triangulation of a 3D point cloud, in this case obtained by a laser, producing a two and a half dimension surface. The points are previously filtered, so that the data representing the vegetation are excluded. This way, is built a model of the load bearing surface. Tests performed in natural terrain illustrate the performance of the method. The obtained maps represent the terrain profile in detail according to the defined resolution, which should be chosen taking into account a tradeoff between level of detail and computational processing power required.