An integrated method for DEM simplification with terrain structural features and smooth morphology preserved

Abstract

ABSTRACT As a key focus of cartography and terrain analysis, the simplification of a digital elevation model (DEM) is used to preserve the pattern features of the terrain surface while suppressing its details over multiple scales. Statistical filtering and structural analysis methods are commonly used for this process. The structural analysis method performs well in identifying terrain structural edges, while it tends to discard the smooth morphology of a terrain surface. In addition, the filter that aims to reduce noise on a surface may over-smooth the terrain structural edges. Therefore, to preserve both the terrain structural edges and smooth morphology, we propose to combine the techniques of statistical filtering and structural analysis. Specifically, all the critical elevation points and structural edges are first detected from the DEM surface by using the structural analysis method. Then, the iterative guided normal filter is used to smooth the generalized DEM with the guidance of the structure of the original surface. After this process, the terrain structure is retained in the smooth surface of the DEM. The experimental results with a real-world dataset show that our method can inherit the merits of both structural analysis and statistical filter in preserving terrain features for multi-scale DEM representations.