EVALUATION OF MULTISCALE TERRAIN ROUGHNESS BASED ON UAV DATASETS: A CASE OF A LEBANESE REGION

DOI: 10.24057/2414-9179-2018-2-24-241-249

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About the Author

Jean A. Doumit

Lebanese University, Faculty of literatures and human sciences,
Beirut, Fanar, Lebanon,
E-mail: jeandoumit@gmail.com

Abstract

Surface Roughness is an important geomorphological variable, no single definition exists; however, within the context of geomorphometry, we use surface roughness as an expression of variability in a topographic surface at a given scale.

The obtaining of a Digital Surface models (DSMs) at different scales and levels before the appearance of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) was very rare or impossible. UAV’s with advanced photogrammetry softwares which produce high-resolution Digital Surface Models. In this paper, we tested terrain roughness at multiscale DSM generated from six different UAV flight heights of 20, 40, 60, 120, 240 and 360 meters.

We tested an easily calculated terrain roughness index (TRI) and the vector roughness measure (VRM) which provides an objective quantitative measure of topographic heterogeneity.

TRI and VRM values of the six DSMs were correlated to understand the influence of spatial resolution on terrain heterogeneity, as a result of statistics and regression analysis the first three highresolution DSMs save the degree of roughness and the last three generated from flight heights of 120, 240 and 360 meters lost the roughness degree with the loss of scale and spatial resolution.

Keywords

UAV, DSM, Ruggedness

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For citation: Doumit J.A. EVALUATION OF MULTISCALE TERRAIN ROUGHNESS BASED ON UAV DATASETS: A CASE OF A LEBANESE REGION. Proceedings of the International conference “InterCarto. InterGIS”. 2018;24(2):241–249 DOI: 10.24057/2414-9179-2018-2-24-241-249