A Classification Method of Landform Elements Based on
Douglas-Peucker Algorithm for Multi-scale Morphology
Qisheng Wang
Undergraduate School, National
University of Defense Technology
Changsha, 410072,
Hunan Province, China
+86 13739069793
21772366@qq.com
Kang Xin
College of Geospatial information,
Information Engineering University
Zhengzhou, 450000
Henan Province, China
+86 13526663458
kangx@lreis.ac.cn
Afeng Yang
College of Electronic Science and
Technology,National University of
Defense Technology
Changsha, 410072,
Hunan Province, China
+86 13357316965
yangafeng09@163.com
Lin Li
Undergraduate School, National
University of Defense Technology
Changsha, 410072,
Hunan Province, China
+86 15173110100
381292241@qq.com
Guo Cheng
Undergraduate School, National
University of Defense Technology
Changsha, 410072,
Hunan Province, China
+86 13875866427
guocheng@nudt.edu.cn
ABSTRACT
Landform elements (e.g. ridge, valley) are the basic morphologic
types of earth’s surface. All types of geomorphy are formed by
different spatial combination of landform elements, so landform
elements are the foundation of studying geomorphy. Using a pre-
assigned set of topographic attributes derived from the digital
elevation model (DEM), most of existing classification methods
of landform elements are likely to encounter a problem that local
topographic attributes can not catch the terrain context well in the
process of landform elements mapping. To solve the problem, we
improve the Geomorphons classification method and propose a
new classification method of landform elements based on
Douglas-Peucker algorithm for the multi-scale morphology in this
paper. The proposed method effectively overcomes the problem of
the Geomorphons classification method which can not show the
multi-scale characteristics of landform elements and thus might
result in misclassification in rugged area. The experimental results
show that the proposed method can get more reasonable results
than that by the Geomorphons classification method.
CCS Concepts
•Information systems → Information systems
applications → Spatial-temporal systems → Geographic
information systems.
Keywords
landform elements; multi-scale morphology; Douglas-Peucker
algorithm; DEM.
1. INTRODUCTION
Landform elements are the basic topographic types of earth’s
surface formed by a group of adjacent spatial positions with
similar combination of topographic conditions [1], such as ridge,
valley, saddle, flat and pit. By different spatial combination,
landform elements can be assembled into various geomorphic
types at higher level [2]. The objective analysis, description and
expression of geomorphology have always been the key point for
geographers. Landform elements not only play an important role
in the study of geomorphology [3], but also are often used in
selecting basic units for digital soil mapping [4] and landscape
ecologic mapping [5].
At present, the quantitative classification methods of landform
elements mainly use the DEM to classify the earth’s surface
based on spatial characteristics and specify the attribution [1]. The
basic ideas of the existing methods can be summarized into two
kinds: clustering and classifying. The method of clustering is to
cluster the set of topographic attributes (such as gradient,
curvature, etc.) derived from the DEM, and then classify them as
landform elements types (as in [6-8]). But it is difficult to
determine the number of clusters in advance, and because
clustering is in the attribute space composed of the set of
topographic attributes, the important location information is not
taken into account, so it may not be easy to give a reasonable
geomorphology meaning of the clustering results.
The method of classifying is to preset a landform elements
classification system firstly, then to classify the landform elements
based on some corresponding reasoning methods according to the
specific definition of each landform element. Such classification
methods can be roughly divided into three kinds as below.
The first type of method requires the user to explicitly give the
definition of each type of landform element based on the
characteristics of the study area based on various topographic
attributes [9, 10]. The second type of method is to use the typical
location of the landform elements in the study area as a prototype
to define the corresponding landform elements [11]. This method
can get both attribute information and location information, which
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that
copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page . Copyrights
for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be
honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or
republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior
specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from
Permissions@ acm.org .
ICCDE' 19, May 4–6, 2019, Shanghai, China
© 2019 Association for Computing Machinery.
ACM ISBN 978-1-4503- 6124-8/19 /05…$15.00
https://doi. org/10.1145/ 3330530.3332300