An Experimental Analysis of Digital Elevation Models Generated with Lidar Data and UAV Photogrammetry

A digital elevation model (DEM) is a very important product that represents the topography digitally. It is an essential requirement of many engineering applications. From past to present, the methodology of DEM generation process is changed with respect to technology. Today, the laser scanner and aerial imagery are two widely used technologies to get DEM. Especially, the computer vision aided the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) opened new horizons in this regard. This study investigates the airborne LiDAR and UAV based DEM comparisons in terms of correlation and vertical accuracy. For this purpose four different LiDAR data are provided. Moreover, a photogrammetric flight is carried out with UAV and images of the study area are captured after field surveys. Then, five different DEMs are generated from five different point clouds. Finally, the statistical analyses are performed to calculate the correlations and accuracies of DEMS. According to the analysis, the UAV based models are as accurate as LiDAR based models along with some other advantages.