  A set of bathymetry point clouds acquired by different measurement techniques
at different times, having different accuracy and varying patterns of points,
are approximated by an LR B-spline surface. The aim is to represent the sea
bottom with good accuracy and at the same time reduce the data size
considerably. In this process the point clouds must be cleaned by selecting the
"best" points for surface generation. This cleaning process is called
deconfliction, and we use a rough approximation of the combined point clouds as
a reference surface to select a consistent set of points. The reference surface
is updated with the selected points to create an accurate approximation. LR
B-splines is the selected surface format due to its suitability for adaptive
refinement and approximation, and its ability to represent local detail without
a global increase in the data size of the surface
