DEM EXTRACTION FROM CHANG'E-1 LAM DATA BY SURFACE SKINNING TECHNOLOGY

Abstract. DEM is a digital model or 3-D representation of a terrain's surface and it is created from terrain elevation data. The main models for DEM extraction based on Lidar data or Laser Altimeter data currently use the idea that point cloud is scattered, such as regular grid model, TIN model and contour model. Essentially, in these above methods, the discrete points are interpolated into regular grid data and irregular grid data. In fact, point cloud generated by Laser Altimeter is not totally scattered, but have some regularity. In this paper, to utilize this regularity, the proposed method adopts surface skinning technology to generate DEM from Chang'E-1 Laser Altimeter data. The surface skinning technology is widely used in the field of mechanical engineering. Surface skinning is the process of passing a smooth surface through a set of curves called sectional curves, which, in general, may not be compatible. In the process of generating section line, a need for attention is that it needs to use curvature method to get a set of characteristic points, and these feature points were used to subdivide segment; the next step is generating several curves on some key places. These curves describe the shape of the curved surface. The last step is to generate a curved surface that through these curves. The result shows that, this idea is feasible, useful and it provides a novel way to generate accurate DEM.