Improving Wide-Area DEMs Through Data Fusion – Chances and Limits

For almost any region of the world multiple wide-area DEMs are available nowadays. Thus, the question arises whether this redundancy can be used to fuse two (or more) DEMs and generate a new one that is more accurate than any of the inputs. We first give a brief overview over some popular DEMs covering large areas. We then review two possible fusion strategies, as well as methods for deriving point-wise accuracies/weights for the fusion process, since in most cases they are not supplied with the DEMs. In the last part of the paper we present experimental results for DEM fusion and a discussion of its benefits and limitations.

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