We present a semiautomatic approach to generate high quality digital terrain models (DTM) from digital surface models (DSM). A DTM is a model of the earths surface, where all man made objects and the vegetation have been removed. In order to achieve this, we use a variational energy minimization approach. The proposed energy functional incorporates Huber regularization to yield piecewise smooth...

To study gully spatial patterns in the badlands using a continuous thalweg vector network, this paper presents methods to extract the badlands’ thalweg network from a regular grid digital terrain model (DTM) by combining terrain morphology indices with a drainage algorithm. This method will delineate a thalweg only where the DTM denotes a significant curvature with respect to DTM accuracy and r...

Switzerland's diversity of flat, rolling and Alpine terrain makes it ideal territory for geometric validation studies. We describe here two parallel investigations of TerraSAR-X (TSX) high-resolution data: geometric validation and estimation of the tropospheric path delay using measurements of corner reflectors (CRs) placed at different altitudes but nearly identical ranges. Geometric validatio...

The Wadden Sea is an almost untouched area with a size of about 7300 km along the German, Dutch and Danish coast. Because of tide the area is flooded two times a day, creating a very special and sensitive ecosystem. In order to protect the Wadden Sea up-todate Digital Terrain Models (DTM) of high accuracy are needed to detect morphological changes. Lidar is an adequate method to obtain an accur...

Differencing between green cover and grape canopy is a challenge for vigour status evaluation in viticulture. This paper presents the acquisition methodology of very high-resolution images (4 cm), using a Sensefly Swinglet CAM unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and their processing to construct a 3D digital surface model (DSM) for the creation of precise digital terrain models (DTM). The DTM was obt...

Accurate digital terrain models (DTMs) are necessary for a wide variety applications. National-scale mediumresolution elevation data have been acquired for the conterminous United States under the USGS National Elevation Data (NED; 10 m and 30 m), the Shuttle Radar Topographic Mapping (SRTM; 30 m), and the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER; 30 m) programs. In...

In coastal areas morphological changes of various kinds are caused by tidal flows, storms, climate change, and human activities. For these reasons a recurrent monitoring becomes necessary in order to detect undesired changes at early stages enabling rapid countermeasures to mitigate or minimize potential harm or hazard. The morphology of the terrain can be represented by highly precise digital ...

Accurate digital terrain models (DTM) are one of the most important requirements for many applications in coastal management and safety, such as the calculation of the volume of dunes and dikes for the purpose of coastal protection. Airborne LIDAR sensors provide dense height information of large areas in an efficient manner, therefore such data are appropriate to derive suitable DTM. Besides r...

The High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) onboard the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express (MEX) has been orbiting Mars since December 2003. One of the main aims is to cover Mars globally in color and stereoscopically at high resolution. HRSC has so far covered almost half of the surface of Mars at a resolution better than 20 meters per pixel. High resolution digital terrain models (DTM) a...

This paper proposes an automatic system which detects buildings in urban and rural areas by the use of first pulse return and last pulse return LIDAR data. Initially both first and last pulse return points are interpolated to raster images. This results to two Digital Surface Models (i.e. DSM) and a differential DSM (i.e. DDSM) is computed by them. Then using a height criterion, rough and smoot...