Extraction of mountains from digital elevation models using mathematical morphology

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Extraction of mountains from digital elevation models using mathematical morphology

Dinesh Sathyamoorthy
Science And Technology Research Institute For Defense (STRIDE)
Ministry of Defense, Malaysia
Email: dinsat@yahoo.com

ABSTRACT
A mountain is any part of the Earth’s crust sufficiently elevated above the surrounding land (greater than 300 to 600m) and generally having comparatively steep sides. Given the engineering significance of mountains and the lack of available the lack of previous work concerning the automated extraction of mountains from digital elevation models (DEMs), this research is aimed at developing a mathematical morphological based algorithm to extract mountains from DEMs. First, ultimate erosion is performed on the DEM to extract the peaks of the DEM. Conditional dilation is performed on the extracted peaks to extract the mountain regions of the DEM. The proposed algorithm is tested by implementing it on the DEM of Great Basin.