A Nodal Uncertainty Method to Detect Localized Events From Measured Terrain Surfaces Available to Purchase

With the advent of terrain surface mapping capabilities comes the necessity to extract useful information from the copious data, particularly localized events. Digital image processing methods for edge detection are applied to road surfaces to locate localized road events. A novel method of edge detection is developed based on the Nodal Uncertainty in which the probability distribution of the nodal heights determines the edges of an event. An example demonstrates that the new method performs at least as well as the best digital image processing methods available. Future development of this work is planned for integration with event characterization and identification methods.