Performance comparison among typical open global DEM datasets in the Fenhe River Basin of China

This paper aims to compare the performance of typical open global DEM datasets by using the indexes of elevation error, relative error and hydrologic network. Taking Fenhe River Basin of China as the study area, this research made quantitative performance comparison among four typical open global DEM datasets including SRTM data with 1 (SRTM1) and 3 (SRTM3) resolutions, ASTER Global DEM data at the 2nd version (GDEM-v2) and ALOS World 3D-30 m (AW3D) data. Through process and selection, more than 80,000 ICESat/GLA14 points were used as the reference data, and the elevation error was computed and compared accordingly. Furthermore, relative error was analyzed using slope values, and false slope ratio index was computed and categorically compared. Finally, the hydrologic networks extracted from the four DEM datasets were compared to the reference hydrologic network acquired by visual interpretation from remote sensing images. The research results show that the AW3D has the best performance, which is approximate to but a little better than SRTM1. The performance of SRTM3 and GDEM-v2 is similar, which are much worse than that of AW3D and SRTM1, and the performance of GDEM-v2 is the worst of all.

Automated summary

This study compared the performance of four typical open global DEM datasets in terms of elevation error, relative error, and hydrologic network, finding that AW3D performed the best, being similar to SRTM1, while GDEM-v2 had the worst performance.