The following example is our most sophisticated example yet. A triangulated irregular network (TIN) is a vector representation of a point dataset in a vector surface of points connected as triangles. An algorithm determines which points are absolutely necessary to accurately represent the terrain as opposed to a raster, which stores a fixed number of cells over a given area and may repeat elevation values in adjacent cells that could be more efficiently stored as a polygon.
A TIN can also be resampled more efficiently on the fly than a raster, which requires less computer memory and processing power when using TIN in a GIS. The most common type of TIN is based on Delaunay triangulation, which includes ...
