A fast candidate viewpoints filtering algorithm for multiple viewshed site planning

ABSTRACT

The aim of site planning based on multiple viewshed analysis is to select the minimum number of viewpoints that maximize visual coverage over a given terrain. However, increasingly high-resolution terrain data means that the number of terrain points will increase rapidly, which will lead to rapid increases in computational requirements for multiple viewshed site planning. In this article, we propose a fast Candidate Viewpoints Filtering (CVF) algorithm for multiple viewshed site planning to lay a foundation for viewpoint optimization selection. Firstly, terrain feature points are selected as candidate viewpoints. Then, these candidate viewpoints are clustered and those belonging to each cluster are sorted according to the index of viewshed contribution (IVC). Finally, the candidate viewpoints with relatively low viewshed contribution rate are removed gradually using the CVF algorithm, through which, the viewpoints with high viewshed contribution are preserved and the number of viewpoints to be preserved can be controlled by the number of clusters. To evaluate the effectiveness of our CVF algorithm, we compare it with the Region Partitioning for Filtering (RPF) and Simulated Annealing (SA) algorithms. Experimental results show that our CVF algorithm is a substantial improvement in both computational efficiency and total viewshed coverage rate.