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International Symposium on Visual Computing

ISVC 2009: Advances in Visual Computing pp 1119–1130Cite as

A Variational Approach to Semiautomatic Generation of Digital Terrain Models

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNIP,volume 5876))

Abstract

We present a semiautomatic approach to generate high quality digital terrain models (DTM) from digital surface models (DSM). A DTM is a model of the earths surface, where all man made objects and the vegetation have been removed. In order to achieve this, we use a variational energy minimization approach. The proposed energy functional incorporates Huber regularization to yield piecewise smooth surfaces and an L1 norm in the data fidelity term. Additionally, a minimum constraint is used in order to prevent the ground level from pulling up, while buildings and vegetation are pulled down. Being convex, the proposed formulation allows us to compute the globally optimal solution. Clearly, a fully automatic approach does not yield the desired result in all situations. Therefore, we additionally allow the user to affect the algorithm using different user interaction tools. Furthermore, we provide a real-time 3D visualization of the output of the algorithm which additionally helps the user to assess the final DTM. We present results of the proposed approach using several real data sets.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Computer Graphics and Vision, Graz University of Technology,  

    Markus Unger, Thomas Pock, Markus Grabner & Horst Bischof

  2. Microsoft Photogrammetry,  

    Andreas Klaus

Authors
  1. Markus Unger
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  2. Thomas Pock
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  3. Markus Grabner
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  4. Andreas Klaus
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  5. Horst Bischof
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Nevada, Reno, USA

    George Bebis

  2. NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA, USA

    Richard Boyle

  3. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Bahram Parvin

  4. Desert Research Institute, Reno, NV, USA

    Darko Koracin

  5. Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Saitama University, 255 Shimo-Okubo, Sakura-ku, Saitama-shi, 338-8570, 338-8570, Japan

    Yoshinori Kuno

  6. Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA

    Junxian Wang

  7. Univ. of Zurich, Department of Informatics, Winterthurerstr. 190, P.O. Box, 8057, Zurich, Switzerland

    Renato Pajarola

  8. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 94550, Livermore, CA, USA

    Peter Lindstrom

  9. University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, 53754, Sankt Augustin, Germany

    André Hinkenjann

  10.  ,  

    Miguel L. Encarnação

  11. SCI Institute & School of Computing, University of Utah, 84112, Salt Lake City, UT, USA

    Cláudio T. Silva

  12. Desert Research Institute, 89512, Reno, NV, USA

    Daniel Coming

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© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Unger, M., Pock, T., Grabner, M., Klaus, A., Bischof, H. (2009). A Variational Approach to Semiautomatic Generation of Digital Terrain Models. In: Bebis, G., et al. Advances in Visual Computing. ISVC 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5876. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10520-3_107

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10520-3_107

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-10519-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-10520-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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