VOLUME 75, NUMBER 1
PHOTOGRAMMETRIC ENGINEERING & REMOTE
SENSING
JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR PHOTOGRAMMETRY
AND REMOTE SENSING
This month’s cover shows two possible ways of representing light detection
and ranging (lidar) data collected over the USGS
Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS)
center facility outside Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The
main image is an example of a traditional surface
representation from all of the lidar points collected,
with imagery overlaid on top of this rendered surface.
The inset shows a volumetric, or voxel, representation
of the same data set, using a fusion of lidar laser
intensity and the corresponding red band from the
imagery used in the surface example. The voxel
matrix model has many fundamental properties that
have shown promise for representing and modeling
geospatial data in three dimensions. A discussion of
using voxels to represent lidar and model in three
dimensions will be discussed in the February PE&RS
Highlight Article. For more information on this image,
contact Jason Stoker, Physical Scientist, U.S. Geological
Survey, jstoker@usgs.gov.
An automated forest digital surface model (DSM) extraction
method from balloon stereo photographs upgraded through
the evaluations of the image matching accuracy and forest
surface height estimation of a tropical peat swamp forest in
Narathiwat, Thailand
Approximation theory is applied for the fi rst time to account
for the theoretical reasons underlying the correlation between
DEM errors and terrain morphology, sampling density, and
interpolation method.
Incorporating soil reflectance models in unmixing algorithms
for the simultaneous extraction of sub-pixel crop cover fraction
and its pure spectral features.
On the basis of several tests with a digital, large format frame
camera and discussions on the recent innovations in hardware
and software, the current status in automated photogrammetric
DEM generation is presented.