Indexing Mixed Aperture Icosahedral Hexagonal Discrete Global Grid Systems

Discrete global grid systems (DGGSs) are an emerging multiresolution 3D model used to integrate and analyze big earth data. The characteristic of multiresolution is usually realized by hierarchically subdividing cells on the sphere using certain refinement. This paper introduces mixed aperture three- and four- icosahedral hexagonal DGGSs using two types of refinement, the various combinations of which can provide more resolutions compared with pure aperture hexagonal DGGSs and can flexibly design the aperture sequence according to the target resolutions. A general hierarchy-based indexing method is first designed, and related indexing arithmetics and algorithm are developed based on the indexing method. Then, the grid structure on the surface of the icosahedron is described and by projection spherical grids are obtained. Experiments show that the proposed scheme is superior to pure aperture schemes in choosing grid resolutions and can reduce the data volume by 38.5% in representing 1-km resolution raster dataset
using the proposed indexing arithmetics to replace spherical geometry operations in generating discrete spherical vector lines based on hexagonal cells can improve the generation efficiency.