An automated, open-source pipeline for mass production of digital elevation models (DEMs) from very-high-resolution commercial stereo satellite imagery

Shean, David; Alexandrov, Oleg; Moratto, Z. M.; Smith, B. E.; Joughin, Ian; Porter, Claire; Morin, Paul

doi:10.1016/j.isprsjprs.2016.03.012

Cited by 534 publications

(557 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…DEMs are increasingly available at high resolution for ice surfaces [4,16,18,20], and reproducible, accurate methods of extracting surface meltwater channels are necessary for quantifying their temporal and spatial characteristics. Flow routing has numerous advantages for delineating meltwater channels; however, previous research by Yang et al (2015) [34] on the use of flow routing over moderate-resolution ice surface DEMs found that (1) automated sink preservation thresholds missed over half of mapped moulins and resulted in significantly overestimated drainage network extent; (2) mapped channel networks could be replicated by flow routing with match rates in excess of 85% when a 600 m buffer was applied; (3) less than 40% of the FR drainage network did not match the mapped drainage network, leading to the conclusion that these channels were miscoded.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Hydrologically, supraglacial meltwater channels influence the spatial and temporal distribution of surface water inputs to en-and sub-glacial hydrological systems [3,[11][12][13], which in turn have been shown to influence glacier and ice sheet dynamics (e.g., [3,14,15]). This recent and growing interest has been concurrent with a growing availability of high-resolution remotely sensed imagery and topographic data of ice surfaces [16][17][18][19][20].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This avoids the complication of shape analysis (e.g., [8]) or linear feature detection (e.g., [17]), and facilitates the easy coupling of channel networks with hydrological models and topographically derived morphometrics such as stream ordering, contributing area, and gradient (e.g., [45]). Furthermore, using flow routing to delineate supraglacial channels provides the opportunity to capitalize on the growing availability of often free, high-resolution topographic data of a variety of glacier and ice sheet surfaces [16,18,20,46].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Flow Routing for Delineating Supraglacial Meltwater Channel Networks

et al. 2016

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Abstract:Growing interest in supraglacial channels, coupled with the increasing availability of high-resolution remotely sensed imagery of glacier surfaces, motivates the development and testing of new approaches to delineating surface meltwater channels. We utilized a high-resolution (2 m) digital elevation model of parts of the western margin of the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) and retention of visually identified sinks (i.e., moulins) to investigate the ability of a standard D8 flow routing algorithm to delineate supraglacial channels. We compared these delineated channels to manually digitized channels and to channels extracted from multispectral imagery. We delineated GrIS supraglacial channel networks in six high-elevation (above 1000 m) and one low-elevation (below 1000 m) catchments during and shortly after peak melt (July and August 2012), and investigated the effect of contributing area threshold on flow routing performance. We found that, although flow routing is sensitive to data quality and moulin identification, it can identify 75% to 99% of channels observed with multispectral analysis, as well as low-order, high-density channels (up to 15.7 km/km 2 with a 0.01 km 2 contributing area threshold) in greater detail than multispectral methods. Additionally, we found that flow routing can delineate supraglacial channel networks on rough ice surfaces with widespread crevassing. Our results suggest that supraglacial channel density is sufficiently high during peak melt that low contributing area thresholds can be employed with little risk of overestimating the channel network extent.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Flow Routing for Delineating Supraglacial Meltwater Channel Networks

et al. 2016

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“…It was created using the AMES stereo-pipeline (Shean et al, 2016) and the processing parameters that were used in Marti et al (2016). The two SPOT5 DEMs agency (Korona et al, 2009).…”

Section: Geodetic Mass Balancementioning

confidence: 99%

Multi-decadal mass balance series of three Kyrgyz glaciers inferred from transient snowline observations

Barandun

Huss

Kääb

et al. 2017

Preprint

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Abstract.Glacier mass balance observations in the Tien Shan and Pamir mountains are sparse and often discontinuous. Nevertheless, glaciers are one of the most important components of the high-mountain cryosphere in the region; they strongly influence water availability in the arid, continental and intensely populated downstream areas. This study provides reliable and continuous mass balance series for selected glaciers located in the Tien Shan and Pamir-Alay. A combination of three independent methods was 5 used to reconstruct for the past two decades the mass balance of the three benchmark glaciers, Abramov, Golubin and No.354. By applying different approaches, it was possible to compensate for the limitations and shortcomings of each individual method. This study proposes the use of transient snowline observations throughout the melting season obtained from satellite imagery and terrestrial automatic cameras. By combining modelling with remotely acquired information on summer snow depletion, it was possible to infer glacier mass changes for unmeasured years. Multi-annual mass changes based on high-10 accuracy digital elevation models and in situ glaciological surveys were used to validate the results for the investigated glaciers. balance modelling significantly narrows the uncertainty ranges of the estimates, and hence highlights the potential of the methodology for application to inaccessible glaciers at larger scales for which no direct measurements are available.

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“…The satellite stereo images are showing the attractive prospects in dense image matching area. Thus since recent years, a lot of researchers have done experiments on dense image matching, DSM generation and 3D reconstruction with high resolution satellite imagery (d 'Angelo and Reinartz, 2011;Wohlfeil et al, 2012;Franchis et al, 2014;Gong and Fritsch, 2016;Ghuffar, 2016;Shean et al, 2016;Rita et al, 2017). Among various dense image matching methods, SGM method is a popular and efficient way.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Relative Orientation and Modified Piecewise Epipolar Resampling for High Resolution Satellite Images

Gong

Fritsch

2017

Int. Arch. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci.

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ABSTRACT:High resolution, optical satellite sensors are boosted to a new era in the last few years, because satellite stereo images at half meter or even 30cm resolution are available. Nowadays, high resolution satellite image data have been commonly used for Digital Surface Model (DSM) generation and 3D reconstruction. It is common that the Rational Polynomial Coefficients (RPCs) provided by the vendors have rough precision and there is no ground control information available to refine the RPCs. Therefore, we present two relative orientation methods by using corresponding image points only: the first method will use quasi ground control information, which is generated from the corresponding points and rough RPCs, for the bias-compensation model; the second method will estimate the relative pointing errors on the matching image and remove this error by an affine model. Both methods do not need ground control information and are applied for the entire image. To get very dense point clouds, the Semi-Global Matching (SGM) method is an efficient tool. However, before accomplishing the matching process the epipolar constraints are required. In most conditions, satellite images have very large dimensions, contrary to the epipolar geometry generation and image resampling, which is usually carried out in small tiles. This paper also presents a modified piecewise epipolar resampling method for the entire image without tiling. The quality of the proposed relative orientation and epipolar resampling method are evaluated, and finally sub-pixel accuracy has been achieved in our work.

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An automated, open-source pipeline for mass production of digital elevation models (DEMs) from very-high-resolution commercial stereo satellite imagery

Cited by 534 publications

References 35 publications

Flow Routing for Delineating Supraglacial Meltwater Channel Networks

Flow Routing for Delineating Supraglacial Meltwater Channel Networks

Multi-decadal mass balance series of three Kyrgyz glaciers inferred from transient snowline observations

Relative Orientation and Modified Piecewise Epipolar Resampling for High Resolution Satellite Images

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