An improved ANUDEM method combining topographic correction and DEM interpolation

Abstract

Void filling and anomaly replacement in conjunction with auxiliary sources of data have been widely used to improve the quality of existing problematic high-resolution digital elevation models. However, the traditional interpolation methods used for this purpose have always failed to eliminate the discrepancies between different data-sets. In this paper, an improved ANUDEM method is presented for DEM interpolation, which incorporates the idea of topographic correction using high correlation of topological structure between contour lines (CLs) from multi-scale digital elevation models (DEM). Firstly, the terrain topological structure is extracted from the CLs of a low-resolution DEM. The topographic surface correction is then undertaken based on the extracted structure, which recovers the topographic information of the sharp depressions and eminences to fit the high-resolution representation. Finally, the breaklines of the terrain surface are distilled and integrated into the denser DEM generation. The experiments undertaken confirmed the superiority of the proposed method over the other DEM interpolation methods. It is shown that the proposed method can provide results with a higher accuracy, as well as a better visual quality.