Overthinking GIS: A Laplacian Approach to Terrain Usability

The author explores a novel approach to assessing terrain usability by calculating the rate of change of terrain slope. Using DEM data from the USGS, they leverage OpenCV's Laplacian operator to compute the rate of change of pixel values in an image, reflecting changes in terrain slope. A sliding window is then used to calculate area averages, and a threshold is set to generate a binary "usability" map. The author ultimately discovers this is effectively a complex downsampling method.