Given a terrain and surveyor points sampled from from it or from its contours, is there any algorithm that one can use to simplify the points ( i.e., reduce the surveyor points number) and at the same time retaining the terrain characteristics?
The reason I ask this is because the surveyors may take too much redundant points at flat terrain, and these points serve nothing but to slow down my volume calculation process, so I want them to get filtered out.