The geometric and physical analysis methods are conventional methods for the derivation of skeleton lines in the fields of cartography, digital photogrammetry, and related areas. This paper proposes a stepwise approach that uses the physical analysis method in the first stage and the geometric analysis method in the subsequent stage. The physical analysis method analyses the terrain globally to obtain a rough set of skeleton lines for a terrain surface. The rough skeleton lines help to structure the ordering of feature points by the geometric analysis method.