Abstract
Digital Terrain Elevation Data is a set of numerical values that represent the heights of the terrain surface. Terrain has several properties. Among them, roughness is the most widely used one because it gives very useful information to land-based or land-reference platform. There are several ways to measure roughness of terrain. But each of them has own flaws. Moreover, it is not enough to represent the uniqueness of the terrain only by the roughness. We need another metric to measure the actual uniqueness. In this paper, we propose an improved method to measure essential characteristics, uniqueness, of terrain. It gives not only the roughness but also the unevenness. The combination of them makes up the uniqueness. And it can be applied even if there is no pre-planned path on the terrain.