Abstract
River canyons mapping plays an important role in water conservation project construction, tourism resource development, and analysis of fluvial processes. However, the extraction of river canyons via manual interpretation or semi-automatic methods is inefficient and expensive, especially at large spatial scales. Therefore, the objective of this study is to propose a novel method for automatic extraction of river canyons. The method mainly involves (1) extracting the indegree of river segments and generating river buffers based on the indegree, (2) generating topographic profiles at the two riversides of each river segment based on a digital elevation model, (3) extracting peaks from the topographic curves with the assistance of depth curves, (4) matching the peaks from different sides of each river segment based on a distance-priority strategy and then generating peak pairs based on the results, and (5) extracting the geographic range and attributes of river canyons and mapping them into a layer. Results of cases in the Three Gorges and Yarlung Zangbo areas in China illustrate effectiveness and accuracy for the extraction of river canyons. In this case, the false alarm rate and the miss alarm rate of this approach are both no higher than 17%.
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Acknowledgements
This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Project No. 41771431, 41971068) and by the Natural Science Research Project of Universities in Jiangsu Province (Project No. 17KJA170002).
Author’s contributon
S.-Y. Xu developed the main modules of the prototype system conceived and is the main author of the article. A.-B. Li designed the study. T.-T. Dong developed partial modules of the prototype system. X.-L. Xie provided the experimental data and guided the way of writing.
Computer code availability
Name of code: CanyonExtractor;
Developpers: Shi-Yu Xu; An-Bo Li; Tian-Tian Dong; Xian-Li Xie
Contact details: Nanjing Normal University, School of Geography, Nanjing, China; e-mail: SoftXushiyu@hotmail.com;
Year first available: 2020;
Hardware required: CanyonExtractor was run on a computer with 2 cores (1.8 GHz each) and 4 GB RAM, which is a basic running requirement for Visual Studio;
Software required: CanyonExtractor was interpreted with Visual Studio (2012 or versions above) and ArcGIS Engine (ver. 10.2) packages; in addition, the web service for elevations needs tomcat (ver. 8.5.x);
Program language: the code is written in C#;
Program size: 55.3 MB;
Details on how to access the source code: the source files of the CanyonExtractor can be downloaded from github: https://github.com/xushiyu123/Canyon-Extractor.
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Xu, SY., Li, AB., Dong, TT. et al. Automatic mapping of river canyons using a digital elevation model and vector river data. Earth Sci Inform 14, 505–519 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12145-020-00551-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12145-020-00551-9