River Terrace Extraction Based on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Remote Sensing
Li Hui
Yu Zhongdi
Cai Xiaobin
Hu Zunyu
Abstract：River terraces record the information of environmental changes in the process of river evolution.Proper identification and classification of terraces are of great importance to the paleo-environmental reconstruction and local tectonic evolution.Based on the analysis of drawbacks of the traditional approaches,a terrace extraction method using the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) remote sensing is proposed.In this paper,the UAV images and high precision ground control points are used to automatically generate the high resolution DSM (digital surface model) and orthophoto using computer vision-based structure from motion with multi-view stereo photogrammetry (SfM-MVS) techniques.On this basis,the geometric characteristics of river terraces,including the elevation,slope,and image textures are employed to delineate terraces.The proposed method is used to extract the river terraces in the lower reaches of Manhe River,a branch of Hanjiang River.The results show that the terraces extracted with the proposed method have a good agreement with those measured in the field.The proposed method has advantages of high precision and efficiency,and effective visualization for terrace representation.This method provides the technical support for the recognition of terraces,and reveals the potential of UAV remote sensing in geomorphology studies.
Keywords：river terraceunmanned aerial vehicleremote sensingdigital surface modelHanjiang Riverhydrogeology
Publication Date：2017-01-01
Online Publishing Date：2025-08-15(First online date of this platform, not the publication date of the document)
Pages：9( 734-742 )