Extraction of Topographic Structure Lines from Digital Elevation Model Data

Topographic structure lines, including valley lines and ridge lines, represent the skeletons of topographic variation and play important roles in both hydrological analysis and terrain analysis.This research examined two major traditional algorithms, i.e., the running water simulation method and the profile analysis algorithm and developed an iterative filtering -segmentation approach based on image processing techniques for deriving topographic structure lines from Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data.Experimental results from different methods were compared with respect to the accuracy of feature extraction and computational efficiency.It is shown that the proposed iterative filtering-segmentation approach is the most efficient method among these methods.