Heightmap Examiner. A Descriptive Tool for Education in Digital Cartography

This paper describes a graphic application named Heighmap Examiner designed to help educate students on the computer graphics techniques that constitute the core of visualisation modules in GIS software. It applies various pixel-based algorithms over elevation datasets or heightmaps to obtain topographic and cartographic representations such as those made in professional software. The code is open and organised following this educational standpoint to let students understand and modify it if needed, even including new features to the application. This way, they can learn how modern topographical applications deal with terrain data under a computer graphics perspective to obtain contour maps, hypsometric maps, sunlight simulation, rain watersheds, etc., and also any combination of those. This paper describes the software’s overall organisation and the different algorithms applied to enhance performance and visual quality.