Breaklines
Breaklines
• Breakline is a feature line or polyline representing a stream channel, ridge or some other feature that
you wish to preserve in a TIN.
• Lake boundary,
• double edge road,
• double drain of river,
• single line stream and creek,
• kerb in pavement,
• building footprint,
• shoreline,
• valley line,
• passes etc. are examples of breaklines.
• In other words, a breakline is a series of edges that the triangles of a TIN should conform to.
• Breaklines can be very useful when trying to eliminate unwanted pits on the interior of a TIN.
• Breaklines define and control surface behavior in terms of smoothness and continuity.
• As their name implies, breaklines are linear features but points and polygons/polylines can also be
used as an breaklines to define and control the surface behavior in terms of smoothness and
continuity.
Breaklines…
• They have a significant effect in terms of describing surface behavior when incorporated in a
surface model.
• Breaklines can describe and enforce a change in the behavior of the surface.
• Z-values along a breakline can be constant or can vary throughout its length.
• Two types of breaklines can be employed to describe surface behavior:
• Soft breaklines
• Hard breaklines
Breaklines…
• To improve the models created by lidar data, ancillary information is often added to the data.
Breaklines are the prevalent form of this ancillary information.
• Breaklines are two- or three-dimensional features (generally polylines or polygons) introduced to
the TIN to constrain the generation of surface models.
• These introduced breaklines may be developed such that they do not modify the original
surface geometry ("soft" breaklines) or to add a change in curvature to the surface ("hard"
breaklines).
• Breaklines can be stored as ancillary feature data that are dynamically added to the model when
needed (during surface generation or derived product creation).
• And these breaklines can be generated from digitization in Orthophoto/2D feature extraction.
Soft breaklines
• Soft breaklines are used to ensure that known z-values along a linear feature are
maintained in a TIN.
• Soft breaklines can also be used to ensure that linear features and polygon edges are
maintained in a TIN surface model by enforcing the breakline as TIN edges.
• However, soft breaklines do not define interruptions in surface smoothness.
Soft breaklines…
Note how the TIN builder has added extra vertices along the breakline to
ensure that the line is maintained in the TIN. The z-values for these new
nodes have been derived by linear interpolation along the breakline.
When the line is enforced as a breakline, the line is maintained in the
TIN.
• As with all breaklines, soft breaklines can have constant or varying z-values.
• For example, a section of a constant elevation can be defined as a soft breakline e.g. contour lines.
In contrast, a highway with fluctuating elevation can be incorporated into a TIN surface model as a
soft breakline.
Soft breaklines…
• Soft breaklines introduced into a surface such that none of the existing TIN elevations are
modified. These breaklines are used to preserve original elevations in a model or to indicate a
feature in the TIN such as the edge of a road.
Hard breaklines:
• Hard breaklines define interruptions in surface smoothness.
• They are probably the most common and easily understood type of a breakline.
• Hard breaklines are typically used to define streams, ridges, shorelines, building
footprints, dams, and other locations of abrupt surface change.
• Other examples are retaining wall: top and bottom edge/two opposite edge of roads/
two opposite bank of rivers/kerb.
Hard breaklines…
• A hard breakline is a three dimensional polyline or polygon that creates new three
dimensional nodes in the original TIN. These nodes generally (but not necessarily)
are above or below the existing surface defined by the original TIN.
• Thus, the hard breakline modifies the surface itself. Hard breaklines tend to be
more used than soft breaklines.
• Hard breaklines can be – those with the same elevation for each vertex (used for
flat water bodies, for example) and those with the ability to store a different
elevation value for each vertex (a down-stream flow polyline, for example).
• They generally fall in to several categories:
• Mass points
• Water body flattening
• Down stream constraint
Mass points:
• While technically not lines, mass points are precisely surveyed
points that are added to a surface to improve overall accuracy or
to indicate a precise spot elevation (peak of a hill, for example).
Water body flattening:
• These are breaklines of constant elevation (Z) that are added to a
model to enforce a physical constraint. For example, a small body of
static (non-moving) water such as a pond must have constant
elevation throughout.
Down stream constraint:
• This breakline is generally used to trace the centerline of a small stream or drainage
where double-line geometry is not required. It enforces the rule that water always
flows downhill, never uphill. This type of breakline can be introduced from separate
survey data or inferred from the lidar data itself.
• Another hydrological constraint is the double line drain. This is a flowing water body
that must be represented by a "left bank", "right bank" double line geometry. This
type of feature is represented by a polygon in the software. Not only does this
require a downstream constraint ,but also a "river flattening" constraint.
• This constraint says that points directly across from each other on the opposing
banks must have the same elevation (otherwise water flows across the river instead
of down the river).
• Since breaklines better characterize the terrain along with the mass
points, the inputs for TIN formation are as follows:
• Mass points
• Soft breaklines
• Hard breaklines
Point cloud: either a lidar point cloud
or derived by stereo extraction from
overlapping images
TIN Model
• Upcoming figure depicts a soft breakline being introduced to demark the edge of
a road. Note that a vertex has been inserted (green nodes) at each intersection
between the line segment and the TIN. Each of these nodes will take on a Z value
identical to the elevation of the intersected triangle edge.
• Note that since surface has not yet “enforced” this breakline, the triangles
intersected by the line segment have not been modified.
Filled 3D Solid Model
Introduction of soft breakline
• Upcoming fig shows the reconstructed TIN after introduction of a soft breakline.
Note that the elevation of each introduced node is interpolated from the edges of
the original TIN of above mentioned at the point where the line crosses the TIN
edge. That is, a new node (also referred to as a vertex) is created at each point
where one of the introduced lines crosses an edge of the original TIN. This new
model will very closely resemble the original model since we have not introduced
any new elevation points.
• However, there are subtle differences because enforcing the breakline introduces
a new triangle vertex at each point where the line crosses the original TIN.
• This breakline enforcement forces the new TIN to violate the previously mentioned
Delaunay criteria, because it forces triangle edges to be inserted along the
breakline. These areas of “redundant” triangle construction are denoted by the red
circled areas in Figure.
Change in contour position that results when enforcing the
breakline
TIN after enforcement of breakline
• An example of a constant Z value such as a flat water body ( water
body flattening) is followed hereafter.
• A common method of collecting flat water bodies is to use heads-up
digitizing from an orthophoto for the X, Y (planimetric) aspects of the
construction and to store the desired (and single-valued) elevation in
an attribute table.
Lidar intensity image
In given fig:
• Water body is not flat.
• Due to vertical noise in the LIDAR and
potentially wave action on the water body,
these water points will not exhibit the same
vertical values and hence will distort a TIN
rendering of the surface
• Water body must have some elevation
value referenced to MSL.
• To flatten given water body, one must do following things:
• Construct a polygon that denotes the land-water boundary
• Provide a single elevation value to be used for designating the elevation of
the water body
• Either remove all interior points from inclusion in the TIN or set their
elevation values to the chosen water body elevation.
Now breakline (boundary of lake
as polygon) is formed shown in
blue thick line.
The enforced breakline and terrain model.
• case of varying elevation along the breakline.
• a varying Z example such as the edges of a road or, more commonly, a
downstream flow.
• a common method of collecting breaklines is to use digitizing from an
orthophoto for the X, Y (planimetric) aspects of the construction and
to probe the LIDAR (or, more generally, point cloud data) for the Z
value.
• Unlike the constant Z flat water body breaklines, we have to store the
Z for varying elevation breaklines at each vertex.