Multiple observer siting and path planning on lossily compressed terrain

We examine a smugglers and border guards scenario. We place observers on a terrain so as to optimize their visible coverage area. Then we compute a path that a smuggler would take so as to avoid detection, while also minimizing the path length. We also examine how our results are affected by using a lossy representation of the terrain instead. We propose three new application-specific error metrics for evaluating terrain compression. Our target terrain applications are the optimal placement of observers on a landscape and the navigation through the terrain by smugglers. Instead of using standard metrics such as average or maximum elevation error, we seek to optimize our compression on the specific real-world application of smugglers and border guards.