Abstract: Evaluation strategies of terrain generalization approaches for regular-grid DEM data were introduced firstly.Four kinds of generalization methods were used to generalize the same region of DEM data separately,which the scale of DEM was changed from 1∶50 000 to 1∶250 000.And then the generalized results were evaluated in three areas: elevation distribution,derivative slopes and contours' overlay analysis.The factors about how these methods affected the precision of the generalization results were also analyzed.Lastly the structured generalization method was considered to be the best method with the highest precision of these four kinds of regular-grid DEM generalization methods.