Knowledge Based Terrain Analysis

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Abstract
This paper discusses an ongoing development effort to utilize knowledge based techniques for analyzing terrain. The application focuses on analyzing terrain to determine the likely location of various military forces and to determine the movement (traversability) and likely classifications of those forces. The effort has involved (i) the development of representations of terrain objects that facilitate automated reasoning and (ii) the development of a rule based system that reasons about the terrain objects and develops hypotheses about terrain characteristics. The system is largely goal directed and can answer questions such as: Is this a good location for a headquarters unit? Is there a traversable path (by, say, a tank) between points A and B? Where are likely locations for artillery sites? The rules from the system were obtained from domain experts on military tactics. The terrain representation is semantically oriented (rather than grid oriented). The scene is represented as a series of "trees" (using largely quadtree and k-d tree formulations) with each tree representing a terrain feature. Trees are logically "combined" to fire more complex rules. The data in the system can be derived from DMA data bases or other sources.

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