Digital terrain from a two-step segmentation and outlier-based algorithm

We present a novel ground filter for remotely sensed height data. Our filter has two phases: the first phase segments the DSM with a slope threshold and uses gradient direction to identify candidate ground segments; the second phase fits surfaces to the candidate ground points and removes outliers....

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Hingee, Kassel, Caccetta, P., Caccetta, Louis, Wu, X., Devereaux, D.
Format: Conference Paper
Published: 2016
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/61526
Description
Summary:We present a novel ground filter for remotely sensed height data. Our filter has two phases: the first phase segments the DSM with a slope threshold and uses gradient direction to identify candidate ground segments; the second phase fits surfaces to the candidate ground points and removes outliers. Digital terrain is obtained by a surface fit to the final set of ground points. We tested the new algorithm on digital surface models (DSMs) for a 9600km2 region around Perth, Australia. This region contains a large mix of land uses (urban, grassland, native forest and plantation forest) and includes both a sandy coastal plain and a hillier region (elevations up to 0.5km). The DSMs are captured annually at 0:2m resolution using aerial stereo photography, resulting in 1:2TB of input data per annum. Overall accuracy of the filter was estimated to be 89:6% and on a small semi-rural subset our algorithm was found to have 40% fewer errors compared to Inpho’s Match-T algorithm.