Khartik Ram

Abstract: I propose a reference implementation of [3] that describes a method for generating accumulated cost surfaces using irregular landscape graphs. Accumulated cost surfaces are commonly used in landscape ecology, autonomous navigation, and civil engineering to represent travel costs and connectivity among points in a spatial domain. For the purposes of this paper, each accumulated cost surface will represent the connectivity between a single point starting-node and the remaining points in the domain. The construction of these surfaces depends on an underlying landscape graph made up of nodes and distance-weighted edges. Conventionally, landscape graphs are constructed from a complete set of all possible nodes. The original article explored the use and constuction of irregular landscape graphs which are formed from an intelligent subset of all possible points. According to the original article, irregular landscape graphs allow for faster processing speeds relative to regular landscape graphs and avoid directional bias artifacts. The original implementation was made in Python whose sources are available upon request to the author of the original article. The proposed reference implementation has been coded in R because of the strength of existing libraries for generating accumulated cost surfaces using regular landscape graphs [4].