A geomorphology-based approach for digital elevation model fusion - case study in Danang city, Vietnam

Global digital elevation models (DEM) are considered a source of vital spatial information and find wide use in several applications. The Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) Global DEM (GDEM) and Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission (SRTM) DEM offer almost global coverage and provide elevation data for geospatial analysis. However, GDEM and SRTM still contain some height errors that affect the quality of elevation data significantly. This study aims to examine methods to improve the resolution as well as accuracy of available free DEMs by data fusion techniques and evaluating the results with a high-quality reference DEM. The DEM fusion method is based on the accuracy assessment of each global DEM and geomorphological characteristics of the study area. Land cover units were also considered to correct the elevation of GDEM and SRTM with respect to the bare-earth surface. The weighted averaging method was used to fuse the input DEMs based on a landform classification map. According to the landform types, the different weights were used for GDEM and SRTM. Finally, a denoising algorithm (Sun et al., 2007) was applied to filter the output-fused DEM. This fused DEM shows excellent correlation to the reference DEM, having a correlation coefficient R-2 = 0.9986, and the accuracy was also improved from a root mean square error (RMSE) of 14.9 m in GDEM and 14.8 m in SRTM to 11.6 m in the fused DEM. The results of terrain-related parameters extracted from this fused DEM such as slope, curvature, terrain roughness index and normal vector of topographic surface are also very comparable to reference data.