Methodology and Evaluation of Terrain Fusion Based on Different Resolution 2D Images

Currently, digital terrain models (DTMs) are important constituent of any urban navigation system. When modeling the earth's surface in digital form, there occurs voids or gaps in the terrain data. This may result in an erroneous representation of the geographic information system. Terrain fusion is suggested as a solution to fill the voids in the data representation. This paper focuses on this idea and presents a novel terrain fusion methodology and evaluation using satellite imagery (SRTM) and 2D map representation (NDM). We use iso-elevation contour map, a compact feature based representation to evaluate the reference terrain (SRTM) and the fused terrain (SRTM and NDM). We experiment with these criterions of aerial difference, structural similarity and height deviation to estimate the accuracy of fusion methodology. The result shows that the proposed methodology can improve the accuracy in the terrain matching.

1 Introduction

Digital terrain models (DTMs)[1] are nowadays used in many applications including urban navigation as the digital representation for some part of the earth's surface. These terrain models can be represented in many ways. Usually, they are available as elevation information in a regular grid or as 2D images that are acquired from either satellite imagery or 2D map representation.