Fuzzy three-dimensional voronoi diagram and its application to geographical data analysis

A concept of fuzzy three-dimensional Voronoi Diagram is presented for spatial relations analysis of real world three-dimensional geographical data, where it is an extension of well known two-dimensional Voronoi Diagram to three-dimensional representation with uncertain spatial relation information in terms of fuzzy set. It makes possible to analyze quantitatively complex boundaries of geographically intricate areas, to give human friendly fuzzy explanation of determining three-dimensional directions, and to express uncertain spatial relations by precise unified fuzzy description. It is applied to decide spatial direction relations of artificial geographicalmountain data, which includes 8 spatial directions with at most 60 relative direction relations, and it leads to detect threedimensional directions whereas the expression of traditional 4 directions and 12 relative directions indicate two-dimensional directions only. The proposed concept aims to discriminate neighbors' class relations and spatial-temporal changes of specially appointed objects, and also aims to be a tool to achieve the intellective extraction and analysis of geographical data of a mountainous area located in northeast China.