Region-based Analysis of Digital Surface Models

This general statement is also if not in particular valid for acquiring and processing Digital Elevation Models. On one hand, important developments like radar-interferometric sensors (e.g., the Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission, SRTM) or laser scanners (e.g., the operational systems TopoSys, TopScan or ALTM) have become available to the market. On the other hand, important tasks along the data processing chain like the normalization of Digital Surface Models (DSMs) or the extraction of object types using elevation information very often do not lead to satisfying and reliable results as obtained with human operators. This is the motivation to present a novel region-based, multi-scale approach which can be applied on elevation data for the above mentioned processing tasks. Chapter 2 will describe the underlying methodology in more detail while Chapter 3 will present results using elevation data from laserscanning.