A High-Resolution Satellite DEM Filtering Method Assisted with Building Segmentation

Abstract

Digital elevation model (DEM) filtering is critical in DEM production, and large-area meter-level resolution DEM is mainly generated from high-resolution satellite images. However, the current DEM filtering methods are mostly aimed at laser scanning data and tend to excessively remove ground points when processing a satellite digital surface model (DSM). To accurately filter out buildings and preserve terrain, we propose a DEM filtering algorithm using building segmentation results of orthophoto. Based on morphological filtering, our method estimates the probability of being a built-up area or mountains for DSM, and according to this probability the filtering parameters are adaptively adjusted. For robustness, our method performs the above filtering operation on DSM through a sliding-window approach, and finally the nonground points are determined by the votes of multiple filtering. Experiments against six representative data sets have shown that our method achieved superior perfor- mance than classical algorithms and commercial software.