Consistent Modelling of Terrain and Drainage Using Deformable Models

We propose an automated approach to modeling drainage channels—and, more generally, linear features that lie on the terrain—from multiple images, which results not only in high-resolution, accurate and consistent models of the features, but also of the surrounding terrain. In our specific case, we have chosen to exploit the fact that rivers flow downhill and lie at the bottom of local depressions in the terrain, valley floors tend to be “U” shaped, and the drainage pattern appears as a network of linear features that can be visually detected in single gray-level images.