Abstract A digital terrain model (DTM) is defined as the digital cartographic representation of the elevation of the earth's surface created from discrete elevation points. DTMs have been applied to a diverse field of tasks, such as forest management, urban planning, ice sheet mapping, flood control, road design, hydraulic simulation, visibility analysis of the terrain, and topographic change q...

Digital surface representation from a set of three-dimensional samples is an important issue of computer graphics that has applications in different areas of study such as engineering, geology, geography, meteorology, medicine, etc. The digital model allows important information to be stored and analyzed without the necessity of working directly with the real surface. In addition, we can integr...

Digital terrain models (DTMs) in recent times have become an integral part of National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) of many countries world-wide due to their invaluable importance. DTMs play a major role in hydrologic modeling, sediment transport, soil erosion estimation, drainage basin morphology, vegetation, and ecology. DTM generation however has a setback of high cost of primary data ...

The integration of digital terrain models (DTM) in geographic information systems (GIS) implies automatically an extension of the GIS reference surface and its queryspace. It is trivial that a DTM is the natural boundary representation of theearth's surface. Man-made objects, for instance houses, bridges, dams should be considered in a second step because these objects cannot be represented wel...

In this paper we consider the problem of DTM extraction in dense urban areas. To this aim, we need valuable and reliable data in the tiny open areas among buildings, and a suitable algorithm to reconstruct the terrain discarding these same structures. So, we compare first LIDAR and aerial photogrammetry by evaluating the relative accuracy of the three-dimensional reconstructed surface in the sm...

Since the European Space Agency Mars Express spacecraft entered an orbit around Mars, the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) placed onboard has been imaging the Martian surface. Due to the characteristics of high resolution and stereo imaging capability of the HRSC, the construction of high resolution digital terrain models (DTMs) representing Mars surface topography has been achieved. Howeve...

This work presents the first results of an experiment aiming to derive a high resolution Digital Terrain Model (DTM) by kinematic GPS surveying. The accuracy of the DTM depends on both the operational GPS precision and the density of GPS samples. The operational GPS precision, measured in the field, is about 10 cm. A Monte Carlo analysis is performed to study the dependence of the DTM error on ...

Digital terrain models (DTM) have been used in soil mapping worldwide. When using such models, improved predictions are often attained with the input of extra variables provided by the use of proximal sensors, such as magnetometers and portable X-ray fluorescence scanners (pXRF). This work aimed to evaluate the efficiency of such tools for mapping soil classes and properties in tropical conditi...

Different data sources for the determination of a digital terrain model (DTM) are available. New measurement techniques like laser scanning (LS) and interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) allow a high degree of automation and dense sensing. They pushed the development of new methods for data modelling. This paper presents robust methods for the automatic determination of a DTM from po...

Airborne laser scanning (ALS), often referred to as lidar or laser altimetry, is a remote sensing technique which was originally designed to measure the topography of the Earth’s surface. While the first commercially available airborne laser scanners recorded only the time of one backscattered pulse, state-of-the-art systems record several echoes for each emitted laser pulse. Thereby a 3D data ...