Drawing a Topographical Map

Question

I\'ve been working on a visualization project for 2-dimensional continuous data. It\'s the kind of thing you could use to study elevation data or temperature patterns on a 2

Answer 1

In response to your comment to @erickson and to answer the point about calculating the gradient of your function. Instead of calculating the derivatives of your 300 term function you could do a numeric differentiation as follows.

Given a point [x,y] in your image you could calculate the gradient (direction of steepest decent)

g={  ( f(x+dx,y)-f(x-dx,y) )/(2*dx), 
  {  ( f(x,y+dy)-f(x,y-dy) )/(2*dy) 

where dx and dy could be the spacing in your grid. The contour line will run perpendicular to the gradient. So, to get the contour direction, c, we can multiply g=[v,w] by matrix, A=[0 -1, 1 0] giving

c = [-w,v]