Abstract

Evaluation of the Free Global DEMs Using Aerial LiDAR
Track: 3D GIS
Authors: Fahad Al-Ahmadi

SRTM DEM and ASTER GDEM are evaluated using DEM extracted from Aerial LiDAR. Undeveloped mountainous area with 17 km2 in Madinah city Western Saudi Arabia is selected. First, Pixel by pixel evaluation is applied using Map Algebra in Spatial Analyst tools where Root Mean Square Error and Mean Absolute Error are computed. Then the automatically extracted features (i.e. surface profile and streams) are visually compared. Both DEMs gave very comparable result with superiority of ASTER GDEM.