Automated Determination of Relative Height of Terrain Steps Using Geoprocessing Model

This paper is focused on determining the relative height of terrain steps using a digital elevation model by an automated process. Currently, there is a generational change in military topographic maps in the Czech Republic, which are created according to the newly accepted standardization documents. For this purpose, other decisions were taken, which stipulate the need to create a geographical database with information about the territory of the Czech Republic and its immediate surroundings, which will be source database for creating new edition of Defence topographic maps. One type of geographic objects in the database are relief features, which include terrain steps. Terrain steps are identified in the database only by the course of their upper edges. For the purpose of cartographic map generalization of Defence topographic maps, it is desirable to supplement the characteristic of terrain steps with the attribute of relative height. Using available geoprocessing tools and creating algorithms in Python, an effort was made to create an automated process of finding the upper and lower terrain edges that make up the terrain step. The difference in the average altitude of both edges of the terrain step defines their relative height. After verification of the geoprocessing model using field measurements, the absolute difference of relative height of terrain steps between automatically calculated and measured results is 0.49 m.