Abstract
Motivated by the need to monitor mountain glaciers, this article addresses the estimation of a mountain glacier's flowline, along which the movement of the glacier's terminus can be captured. We propose a method for estimating glacier flowlines through local linear regression gradient descent (gd-flow) on digital elevation model (DEM) images. We additionally propose an aggregation method (median gd-flow) that increases the accuracy of gd-flow by combining flowlines corresponding to different gd-flow window sizes. We compare gd-flow and median gd-flow to a standard hydrological flow model (D8) and a variant of D8 (D8-smooth), which applies D8 to a smooth DEM, across 25 glaciers using manually drawn flowlines as a reference standard. We assess the performance via simulations considering variable terrain and image quantization. Our proposed algorithm (gd-flow) outperforms D8 and D8-smooth in both applied and simulated settings, while median gd-flow further improves gd-flow by leveraging the accuracy of multiple window sizes.
Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callMore From: IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
