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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">ISPRS-Archives</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">ISPRS-Archives</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">Int. Arch. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">2194-9034</issn>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/isprs-archives-L-4-W1-2026-27-2026</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>Learning with Spaceborne LiDAR for Enhancement of Bare-Earth Digital Elevation Models from Global Data</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Cai</surname>
<given-names>Xiandong</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Wilson</surname>
<given-names>Matthew</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9459-6981</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Geospatial Research Institute, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>School of Earth and Environment, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>29</day>
<month>08</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>L-4/W1-2026</volume>
<fpage>27</fpage>
<lpage>33</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Xiandong Cai</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/L-4-W1-2026/27/2026/isprs-archives-L-4-W1-2026-27-2026.html">This article is available from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/L-4-W1-2026/27/2026/isprs-archives-L-4-W1-2026-27-2026.html</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/L-4-W1-2026/27/2026/isprs-archives-L-4-W1-2026-27-2026.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/L-4-W1-2026/27/2026/isprs-archives-L-4-W1-2026-27-2026.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Bare-earth Digital Terrain Models (DTMs) are fundamental to geospatial applications, yet publicly accessible global elevation products are Digital Surface Models (DSMs) with vertical accuracies of 4&amp;ndash;15 m RMSE at 30 m or coarser resolution. Airborne LiDAR achieves sub-metre accuracy but remains costly and spatially fragmented. ICESat-2 ATL08 spaceborne LiDAR photons offer a compelling complement: unlike optical sensors, they physically penetrate dense vegetation canopies to measure ground elevation directly, and ICESat-2 acquires new measurements daily on a 91-day repeat cycle. Incorporating ATL08 into a learning framework, however, poses two challenges: extreme measurement sparsity after quality filtering and an unstructured point geometry incompatible with the dense raster structure of imagery and DSMs. We present a deep neural network that addresses both challenges by fusing remote sensing imagery, Copernicus GLO-30 DSMs, and ATL08 photons to generate 3 m bare-earth elevation from global data. A multi-scale deformable cross-attention mechanism fuses each photon with surrounding image and DSM features in their native geometry&amp;mdash;without rasterisation&amp;mdash;thereby turning sparse measurements into effective guidance features. A Spatial Propagation Network (SPN) then densifies predictions guided by image structure, re-anchored at photon locations at every iteration. Evaluated on the DFC30 benchmark augmented with ATL08 measurements, our method achieves consistent improvements over optical-only baselines across all vegetation classes, improving overall RMSE by 74.5% over Copernicus GLO-30 (cubically interpolated to 3 m spatial resolution), with the largest gains in dense forest canopy (83.74% RMSE reduction) where ground elevation is most difficult to recover.</p>
</abstract>
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