Triangulating contours in large maps

The objective of this work is to design a system for the visualization of geographical terrain in three dimensions. The input of such a system is the contour map of the region to be visualized. Several approaches to solve this problem can be found in the literature. Our approach is based on surface reconstruction or interpolation. We achieve the reconstruction of the terrain surface by pairwise triangulation of map contours in adjacent height levels. The large data size in this application dictated the use of an optimal triangulation algorithm. The algorithm we employed (by G. Toussaint) runs in $O(n(1+t sb0)$ time with $t sb0