Analysis and generation of hiking trail networks from terrain metrics

Abstract

Hiking trail networks in natural environments follow complex patterns that make them challenging to synthesize in procedural generation models. In this project, we analyze which terrain features play an important role in shaping the behavior of trails and in determining their difficulty for hikers. Based on those results, we propose a system to generate realistic trails of a given difficulty level, trained from real examples; this is then used in a larger scale to generate whole networks of hiking trails.