In this paper we propose a new interpolation method using monotone functions to generate a digital elevation model (DEM) from contour lines of a topographic map. The proposed method has the following features. (1) It does not yield unnecessary vibrations that the other methods like the spline interpolation may often do. (2) It can generate more suitable surfaces of DEM. (3) It may choose and utilize the simple-averaging method or the Grimson's regularization method as a post-processing to make

more »

... he surfaces more smooth. We carried out the experiments to verify the effectiveness of our method. From the results, we conclude that our method is more effective than the traditional methods like the spline interpolation, Akima's interpolation, etc..