Title
Automatic identification of watercourses in flat and engineered landscapes by computing the skeleton of a LiDAR point cloud.
Abstract
Drainage networks play a crucial role in protecting land against floods. It is therefore important to have an accurate map of the watercourses that form the drainage network. Previous work on the automatic identification of watercourses was typically based on grids, focused on natural landscapes, and used mostly the slope and curvature of the terrain. We focus in this paper on areas that are characterised by low-lying, flat, and engineered landscapes; these are characteristic to the Netherlands for instance. We propose a new methodology to identify watercourses automatically from elevation data, it uses solely a raw classified LiDAR point cloud as input. We show that by computing twice a skeleton of the point cloud—once in 2D and once in 3D—and that by using the properties of the skeletons we can identify most of the watercourses. We have implemented our methodology and tested it for three different soil types around Utrecht, the Netherlands. We were able to detect 98% of the watercourses for one soil type, and around 75% for the worst case, when we compared to a reference dataset that was obtained semi-automatically.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1016/j.cageo.2017.06.003
Computers & Geosciences
Keywords
Field
DocType
LiDAR,Skeleton,Watercourse,Medial Axis Transform
Drainage,Computer science,Hydrology,Terrain,Remote sensing,Lidar,Elevation,Point cloud,Drainage network
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
106
0098-3004
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
8
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Tom Broersen100.34
Ravi Peters230.74
Hugo Ledoux323122.27