Aerial perspective for shaded relief

ABSTRACT

Aerial perspective is an essential design principle for shaded relief that emphasizes high elevation terrain using strong luminance contrast and low elevations with low contrast. Aerial perspective results in a more expressive shaded relief and helps the reader to understand the structure of a landscape more easily. We introduce a simple yet effective method for adding aerial perspective to shaded relief that is easy to control by the mapmaker.

KEYWORDS:

• Swiss style relief shading
• hillshade
• shaded relief
• aerial perspective
• proximity luminance covariance
• atmospheric depth

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and Brooke E. Marston for copy editing this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data Availability Statement

Java source code for applying aerial perspective to a shaded relief image is openly available in the Zenodo repository, combined with sample data for creating Figure 8 (shaded relief images without and with aerial perspective, and the corresponding digital elevation model of the Wasatch Range, Utah, USA) at Jenny and Patterson (2020) “Aerial Perspective for Shaded Relief”, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3947033.