Assessment of DEM derived from very high-resolution stereo satellite imagery for geomorphometric analysis

Abstract

Very high-resolution satellite stereo images play an important role in cartographical and geomorphological applications, provided that all the processing steps follow strict procedures and the result of each step is carefully assessed. We outline a general process for assessing a reliable analysis of terrain morphometry starting from a GeoEye-1 stereo-pair acquired on an area with different morphological features. The key steps were critically analyzed to evaluate the uncertainty of the results. A number of maps of morphometric features were extracted from the digital elevation models in order to characterize a landslide; on the basis of the contour line and feature maps, we were able to accurately delimit the boundaries of the various landslide bodies. ARTICLE HISTORY

Quality assessment of digital surface models extracted from WorldView-2 and WorldView-3 stereo pairs over different land covers

“…Regarding radiometric and geometric quality of the imagery, the last investigations about extracting 3D information from VHR satellite stereo pairs are mainly focused on the new breed of DigitalGlobe's VHR satellites such as GeoEye-1 and WorldView-1/2/3/4 (Aguilar, Saldaña and Aguilar 2014;Noh and Howat 2015;Shean et al 2016;Barbarella, Fiani and Zollo 2017;DeWitt et al 2017) which are capable of capturing panchromatic (PAN) imagery of the land surface with ground sample distance (GSD) even lower than 0.5 m. Others recently published works also pay attention to the capabilities of the PAN triplet from Pléiades-1 to generate DSMs (Poli et al 2015;Di Rita, Nascetti and Crespi 2017;Qin 2016).…”

“…With regard to the image matching algorithm, there are many commercial software packages being able to procedure DSM from VHR stereo images such as MATCH-T, supplied by Trimble, LPS eATE, embedded into ERDAS, or Socet Set ATE, by BAE Systems. Among these, OrthoEngine, the photogrammetric module of Geomatica (PCI Geomatics), has been the most used in research works, serving as a benchmark for others packages in comparison tests (Capaldo et al 2012;Fratarcangeli et al 2016;Barbarella, Fiani and Zollo 2017;Di Rita, Nascetti and Crespi 2017). A few open source tools for DSMs generation from VHR satellite have become available such as Satellite Stereo Pipeline (S2P) (de Franchis et al 2014), the NASA Ames Stereo Pipeline (ASP) (Shean et al 2016), or Digital Automatic Terrain Extractor (DATE) (Di Rita, Nascetti and Crespi 2017).…”

Impact of interpolation techniques on the accuracy of large-scale digital elevation model

“…Nowadays, DEM provides the most standard method to derive the desired parameters such as curvature, drainage network, slope, and aspect for managing the geomorphological process [61]. The extracted topographic parameters rely on the DEM resolution and accuracy, and hence, large-scale DEMs at a high resolution, or small cell size, are more reliable to draw out these elements [62,63]. The interpolation quality is based on the required number and distribution of the selected GCPs [20,[64][65][66], but it is influenced by data diffusion rather than its density [23].…”

Geomorphological mapping and anthropogenic landform change in an urbanizing watershed using structure-from-motion photogrammetry and geospatial modeling techniques

“…DSM2DTM functions by applying a series of filters to derive a local minimum based on a user-defined window size and compares DSM values to the local minimum or ground surface elevation. Elevation values exceeding the defined ground surface elevation are removed and replaced with the minimum for the patches identified (Barbarella et al, 2017). In this way, the DSM was filtered to produce a DTM and was prepared to be directly compared with the 2012 LiDAR data.…”