It is very important to compress vector relief data for the study and application of the terrain environment simulation

cartographic generalization

GIS and so on. Using the theory of wavelet analysis and the characteristics of the vector relief data

in this paper

a model to compress contour data is developed. Firstly

a basic ideal is proposed to compress contour data based on wavelet transformation. Then

the boundary of wavelet transformation is processed by a developed method. And the feature points of contour data are selected according on given rules so that the compressed data can retain the characteristic of original data well. Thus

a model to compress contour data is obtained based on wavelet transformation. Finally

actual contour data are experimented using the developed compression model. The theory analysis and experiments show that the developed model not only obtains the high compression ratio for contour data but also retain the trend and the characteristics of original contour data. The developed method can be used with the widely areas such as digital terrain models

GIS

remote sensing et al.