Point clouds provide high-resolution topographic data which is often classified into bare-earth, vegetation, and building points and then filtered and aggregated to gridded Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) or Digital Terrain Models (DTMs). Based on these equally-spaced grids flow-accumulation algorithms are applied to describe the hydrologic and geomorphologic mass transport on the surface. In this contribution, we propose a stochastic point-cloud filtering that, together with a spatial bootstrap sampling, allows for a flow accumulation directly on point clouds using Facet-Flow Networks (FFN). Additionally, this provides a framework for the quantification of uncertainties in point-cloud derived metrics such as Specific Catchment Area (SCA) even though the flow accumulation itself is deterministic.

Date Published: 10 October 2018
PDF: 12 pages
Proc. SPIE 10783, Remote Sensing for Agriculture, Ecosystems, and Hydrology XX, 107831C (10 October 2018); doi: 10.1117/12.2318424

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 10783:
Remote Sensing for Agriculture, Ecosystems, and Hydrology XX
Christopher M. U. Neale; Antonino Maltese, Editor(s)