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important to the land use classification and control of soil and 
water loss, etc. 
As a whole, the visual test and experimental results show that 
the correction method can integrate the feature information with 
grid DEM and describe the terrain more closely to the reality, 
especially in the abrupt changing areas. 
5. CONCLUSIONS 
As the existing grid-based DEM plays an important role in GIS 
and it’s widely used to modelling the terrain surface, the 
disadvantages should be made up. With the analysis of terrain 
representation distortion, this paper provides a new structure of 
DEM using the embedded terrain features, and gives a 
correction method to the existing grid-based DEM. From the 
visual test, terrain features are integrated with the grid mesh and 
DEM representation is improved. With the findings of this 
study, the following conclusions can be draw as follows: 
• Terrain representation distortion is inevitably existed in 
grid-based DEM, and it goes against with terrain analysis 
and DEM application. 
• The new structure is simple and easy to realize, what’s 
more, it’s still a raster structure. It makes good use of the 
existing grid structure. 
• The correction method improves the representation 
precision of DEM, then the digital terrain analysis can be 
improved. It also gives some suggestions to DEM 
sampling. With the method, high quality demanded DEM 
can be produced and DEM will be more widely used. 
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT 
This study was funded through support from the the National 
High-tech Research and Development Program (863 Program, 
No. 2006AA12Z212) and the Scientific Research and 
Innovation Plan of the Regular Institutions of Higher Education 
Graduate Student of Jiangsu Province (No. CX07B_040z).