Morphological Processing of Severely Occluded Digital Elevation Images to Extract and Connect Stream Channels

Hyun-chong Cho, K. Clint Slatton
2007 2007 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing  
Recent advances in technology have enabled the acquisition of high-resolution topographic data by means of Airborne Laser Swath Mapping (ALSM), which can yield Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) with horizontal resolutions of 1m. A DEM is a grayscale image wherein pixel value corresponds to elevation. Using ALSM imaging systems over forested terrain, we filter out the laser returns from the occluding foliage and estimate bare-surface DEMs. Extracting stream networks from DEMs is important for
more » ... ing many hydrological processes. We apply a sequence of morphological operations to an ALSM DEM to detect stream channels in forested terrain. We verify the accuracy of the results using a set of error measures over simulated terrain and also using GPS ground truth over real terrain. For linking disconnected stream segments, a measure of pixel connectedness is used.
doi:10.1109/icip.2007.4379137 dblp:conf/icip/ChoS07 fatcat:rfv2kwb2mzh6bacqafquuvodde