Mountain Peak Extraction of Grid DEM Based on Aspect Distribution Feature

Methods Based on the uniform distribution feature of the aspect around the mountain peaks,this paper proposes an efficient mountain peak extraction model, in which the aspect is centered on the mountain peak and gradually increases clockwise. Moreover, according to the ridge line fitting method and the recursive thought of depth first search algorithm, the false mountain peaks in the extraction results are removed, while the real mountain peaks are retained. Considering the negative influences of the terrain fragmentation of the entity digital elevation model(DEM), this paper experiments and analyzes with simulated DEM and entity DEM respectively.

Results The results show that the method overcomes the uncertainty of subjective threshold based on closed contour lines. The mountain peak extraction accuracy of simulated DEM can achieve 100% due to its continuity and smoothness. Considering the terrain fragmentation of entity DEM will make it ill-posed, we improve it by adjusting the aspect distribution constraint condition and obtain average extraction accuracy of 96.1%.

Conclusions An efficient mountain peak extraction model is proposed based on the digital terrain analysis technology and the uniform distribution feature of the aspect around the mountain peaks, and the topographic feature points are extracted from the perspective of terrain geometry. Compared with the traditional mountain peak extraction methods, the proposed method is relatively accurate and simple, and can effectively reduce the false mountain.

Objects Mountain peak extraction technology determines the accuracy of the hill position classification and the efficiency of automatic classification of micro-landform. Because of the limitations of elevation and contour lines, such as loss of local mountain peaks and incomplete removal of false mountain peaks, other landform factors could be used to express the distribution feature around the mountain peaks.