Edge-protected IDW-based DEM detail enhancement and 3D terrain visualization

Terrain visualization plays an important role in Digital Twin, geology, environmental science, and exploration. Generating 3D visualization results by the Digital Elevation Model (DEM) is an effective method. However, existing DEM 3D visualization methods generally lack sufficient detail to obtain good visual effects. Therefore, we propose a novel DEM detail enhancement and 3D terrain visualization method. Our method is based on the Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) algorithm and the edge-protected Inverse Distance Weighted (IDW) algorithm, and achieves 3D visualization of DEM data through a workflow of converting the raw DEM data into an image, followed by enhancement and detail optimization of the image, and finally converting the image into triangular meshes. The edge-protected IDW algorithm performs IDW interpolation optimization based on the Canny edge detector combined with the Otsu threshold optimization method to detect edge areas, achieving smooth transitions in the edge areas. Experiments show that our method generates detail-rich 3D visualization results after enhancing original DEM data. We also conducted an ablation study to provide a side-by-side comparison of each step. Our method can be further applied to many tasks, such as virtual reality, GIS, and geological exploration.