Colored Relief Representation


Goals

Algorithms and methods using color to depict terrain elevation on maps.
  • Digital methods for the interactive creation of shaded relief in Swiss-style colors, modulating color by elevation and by exposure to illumination.
  • Methods for generalized small-scale hypsometric tinting (in collaboration with A. Leonowicz, Institute of Cartography, ETH Zurich).

Results

  • An application for colorising grayscale shaded relief in a user-friendly environment, based on a two-dimensional look-up table. Development with C++ and the Mac OS X Cocoa framework.
  • A new method for the automatic generation of generalized hypsometric layers based on percentile filtering. Level of details are steered by a hydrological accumulation flow that is generalized with a custom algorithm. Terrain artifacts can be removed using a carving algorithm. The software was developed in Java.


colorshadingschema

Initialization of the color look-up table from user-defined color points.


schaffhausen

Section of a school map of Schaffhausen produced with the developed software.


hypsometric

Generalized hypsometric layers produced with the developed algorithm


Awards

The Henry Johns Award for the best Cartographic Journal article by the British Cartographic Society. Article:

Jenny, B. and Hurni L. (2006). Swiss-style colour relief shading modulated by elevation and by exposure to illumination. Cartographic Journal, 43-3, p. 198-207. HTML or PDF.


Publications

Leonowicz, A. M., Jenny, B. and Hurni, L. (2009). Automatic generation of hypsometric layers for small-scale maps. Computers & Geosciences, 35, p. 2074–2083. PDF.

Leonowicz, A. M. and Jenny, B. (2008). Generating hypsometric layers from GTOPO30 for small-scale mapping. Proceedings of the 6th ICA Mountain Cartography Workshop, 11-15 Feb. 2008, Lenk, Switzerland, p. 141-148. PDF.

Jenny, B. and Hurni, L. (2008). Farbige Reliefkarten à la Suisse. Geosciences Actuel, 1, p. 27-30. PDF.

Jenny, B. and Hurni L. (2006). Swiss-style colour relief shading modulated by elevation and by exposure to illumination. Cartographic Journal, 43-3, p. 198-207. HTML or PDF.


Maps

See here.

Website

Relief Shading (2002) www.reliefshading.com
A website to give cartographers and interested map readers in-depth information about shaded relief (production and design guidelines).
Authors: Bernhard Jenny and Stefan Räber (Institute of Cartography, ETH Zurich)