Civil and Environmental Engineering Commons^™

Fast Algorithm For Generating Sorted Contour Strings, Norman L. Jones, Michael J. Kennard, Alan K. Zundel

Faculty Publications

Automatic generation of contours for graphical display and map plotting has been studied extensively since the early days of computing. The individual segments making up a contour line are often determined by subdividing the object of interest into small triangles and computing the contours assuming a linear variation on each triangle. However, efficient storage of contour data and the need to place labels (automatically) or to smooth the contours require that the contours be generated in continuous strings of segments. A simple approach to generate such strings is to sort the randomly generated contour segments. Since sorting can be time-consuming, …