An efficient variant of the Priority-Flood algorithm for filling depressions in raster digital elevation models

Abstract

Depressions are common features in raster digital elevation models (DEMs) and they are usually filled for the automatic extraction of drainage networks. Among existing algorithms for filling depressions, the Priority-Flood algorithm substantially outperforms other algorithms in terms of both time complexity and memory requirement. The Priority-Flood algorithm uses a priority queue to process cells. This study proposes an efficient variant of the Priority-Flood algorithm, which considerably reduces the number of cells processed by the priority queue by using region-growing procedures to process the majority of cells not within depressions or flat regions. We present three implementations of the proposed variant: two-pass implementation, one-pass implementation and direct implementation. Experiments are conducted on thirty DEMs with a resolution of 3m. All three implementations run faster than existing variants of the algorithm for all tested DEMs. The one-pass implementation runs the fastest and the average speed-up over the fastest existing variant is 44.6%.