A tile-based method for geodesic buffer generation in a virtual globe

Geometric buffers are important for spatial analysis in many applications of geographic information systems (GISs), such as environmental measurement and management, human health, urban planning, etc. Geometric buffer generation algorithms are well studied in the Euclidean space where the buffer distance is measured by Euclidean metrics; however, very few algorithms are available for generating geometric buffers on the terrain surface in a virtual globe where the buffer distance is measured by geodesic metrics. This paper proposes a tile-based method for geodesic buffer generation according to the characteristics of a virtual globe. It extends the vector tile model (VTM) to organize terrain and vector data, and the XYH algorithm is improved to build geodesic distance fields for terrain meshes. Based on the data organization and the improved XYH algorithm, a geodesic buffer is generated via three main steps: selecting and assembling tiles, updating geodesic distance fields and tracing the boundaries of buffer zones. This method is implemented with multi-scale terrain and vector data, and the experimental results show that it is valid and exact and can be applied in practical applications.