An improved algorithm for geocentric to geodetic coordinate conversion

Description/Abstract

The problem of performing transformations from geocentric to geodetic coordinates has received an inordinate amount of attention in the literature. Numerous approximate methods have been published. Almost none of the publications address the issue of efficiency and in most cases there is a paucity of error analysis. Recently there has been a surge of interest in this problem aimed at developing more efficient methods for real time applications such as DIS. Iterative algorithms have been proposed that are not of optimal efficiency, address only one error component and require a small but uncertain number of relatively expensive iterations for convergence. In a recent paper published by the author a new algorithm was proposed for the transformation of geocentric to geodetic coordinates. The new algorithm was tested at the Visual Systems Laboratory at the Institute for Simulation and Training, the University of Central Florida, and found to be 30 percent faster than the best previously published algorithm. In this paper further improvements are made in terms of efficiency. For completeness and to make this paper more readable, it was decided to revise the previous paper and to publish it as a new report. The introduction describes the improvements in more detail.