Digital Elevation Models

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5 papers in the last four weeks, against 2 the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 28

Sep 28, 2026cs.CV

WorldWeave: Growing Persistent Geometric Worlds for Video Generation

Despite rapid progress, world models still lack explicit, persistent structural memory, making it difficult to preserve consistent world structure during continual scene expansion and cross-view revisits. To address this limitation, we present WorldWeave, a world generation framework that decouples world-state maintenance from visual rendering. Specifically, WorldWeave combines continual elevation-map generation with agent-guided scene organization and stitching to build an expandable explicit 3D world that incrementally extends structural memory while preserving existing structure. First, its terrain module uses diffusion-based image outpainting to generate continuous metric elevation maps under neighborhood conditioning and boundary constraints. Next, an agent integrates user intent, terrain evidence, and cross-region connectivity constraints to construct scenes through hierarchical semantic planning, deterministic geometry compilation, and local revision. Finally, during visual generation, planned camera trajectories query world geometry through a read-only interface, producing depth sequences that guide video synthesis without writing the generated results back into the world state. As a result, structural memory remains independent of short-window video generation, enabling continual expansion without predefined map boundaries and providing a consistent geometric basis for observations across trajectories and repeated visits.

Yifan Huang, Lifan Jiang, Qingyue Hao +5

Zhejiang University · Daerwen AI

Playable Video World Generation Video Generation Camera Trajectories World Digital Elevation Models Peak Memory

Sep 24, 2026cs.CV

Efficient Continuous DEM Reconstruction under Limited Target-Resolution Supervision

High-resolution digital elevation models (DEMs) support Earth observation applications, but paired training references are often available only at coarser output resolutions. Reconstructing finer terrain grids therefore requires both effective transfer beyond the supervised scale and control of dense-query computation. To address this problem, SCOPE learns a continuous terrain representation from coarser-resolution pairs. It predicts a latent coefficient field on the low-resolution grid and reuses local Fourier residual functions through basis evaluation and geometry-guided ensemble fusion. This separates high-dimensional coefficient prediction from output-grid construction. Experiments on geographically distributed land--ocean samples assess supervised reconstruction, unseen-scale inference, cross-domain generalization, and theoretical computation. SCOPE leads the compared methods across six metrics in the main supervised-scale evaluation. At an unseen factor three times the training factor, land reconstruction reduces RMSE and MAE by approximately 12% relative to bicubic interpolation, with errors close to target-scale fine-tuning. Ninefold output density increases counted multiply--accumulate operations by only about 2%. Frozen-model validation on held-out external marine regions reduces RMSE relative to the DEM-specific implicit baseline EBCF-CDEM by approximately 19% under self-downsampling and 2% with cross-product inputs, while also yielding lower RMSE than LIIF-MS in both settings. These results demonstrate the value of reusable coefficient fields for accurate reconstruction beyond the supervised resolution with low incremental arithmetic cost.

Zekai Shi, Meng Zhang, Haokun Zhang +1

School of Human Settlements and Civil Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, 710049, China · School of Artificial Intelligence, Optics and Electronics (iOPEN), Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, 710072, China

Digital Elevation Models Spatiotemporal Fields Ocean

Sep 14, 2026cs.RO

HydroMap: Probabilistic Water Surface Elevation Mapping for Semantic Scene Representation in Inland Waterways

Autonomous surface vehicles operating in inland waterways require a persistent representation of both surrounding structures and the water surface. LiDAR-based simultaneous localization and mapping often produces sparse or missing water returns, leaving this operational surface absent from the reconstructed scene. We propose HydroMap, an odometry-decoupled framework that reconstructs water surface elevation from stereo observations and integrates it with the structural map. Per-frame water points form joint cell observations with propagated stereo and pose uncertainty, and successive observations are fused into a persistent probabilistic elevation map. Semantic map conversion then combines the elevation map with structural geometry in a unified 2.5D representation of water, boundaries, structures, and overhead regions. On the Pohang Canal and Leuven Vaart datasets, the elevation RMSE remains below 5 cm relative to LiDAR references expressed in the same map frame. The elevation and semantic maps are published at 2 Hz and 1 Hz, respectively. HydroMap thereby complements LiDAR maps with a persistent representation of the water surface for downstream navigation in inland waterways.

Zhongbi Luo, Yunjia Wang, Herman Bruyninckx +1

Division of Robotics, Automation and Mechatronics, Department of Mechanical Engineering, KU Leuven, 3001 Leuven, Belgium · Division of Declarative Languages and Artificial Intelligence (DTAI), Department of Computer Science, KU Leuven, 8200 Bruges, Belgium · Department of Mechanical Engineering, TU Eindhoven, 5612 AZ Eindhoven, The Netherlands

Digital Elevation Models Lidar Water Autonomous Surface Vehicles

Sep 11, 2026cs.CV

Guided Super-Resolution of Digital Elevation Models with Diffusion-Based Image Generators

High-resolution digital surface models (DSMs) play an important role in urban analysis, 3D building reconstruction, and infrastructure monitoring, yet their availability remains limited due to the high cost and complexity of data acquisition. In contrast, coarse DSMs from commercial satellite missions are widely accessible, and high-resolution optical imagery is increasingly available from aerial and satellite platforms. We address the resulting mismatch in spatial resolution and propose a DSM superresolution approach that enhances 5 m DSMs to 0.5 m resolution, using guidance from high-resolution spectral images. Our method employs denoising diffusion to transfer information that is visible only in the image, like crisp outlines and detailed roof structures, into the elevation maps. In this way, surface details are reconstructed more accurately than with conventional interpolation or filtering techniques. Experiments on several cities in Central Europe demonstrate that the proposed approach produces high-quality DSMs with improved structural detail and accurate surface geometry. Our results highlight the potential of guided super-resolution with foundational image priors as a means of reconstructing high-resolution surface models.

Armand Mihai Nicolicioiu, Dominik Narnhofer, Nando Metzger +3

Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland · Remote Sensing Technology Institute, German Aerospace Center (DLR), Wessling, Germany

Generative Super-Resolution Digital Elevation Models 3D Reconstruction

Sep 7, 2026cs.CV

KODAMA: Multimodal Digital Twin Reconstruction for Urban RF Propagation Modelling

3D reconstruction typically strives for geometric fidelity or visual plausibility. Radio frequency digital twins (RFDT) are instead judged by whether communication channels behave in them as they do in the real world. RFDTs promise site-specific channel prediction but current practice forces a choice between coarse automated scenes and hand-built, measurement-calibrated models that take weeks to construct per-site. We present KODAMA, an automated pipeline that reconstructs ray tracing-ready RFDTs at city scale from off-the-shelf geospatial data alone: aerial imagery, LiDAR, and photogrammetry yield terrain and watertight building meshes, while exposure-weighted multi-view fusion of street-level imagery recovers façade relief, electromagnetic materials, and clutter---all without site visits or calibration. Across three sites spanning 3.6 to 28 GHz, KODAMA's uncalibrated predictions achieve single-digit RMSE, reducing point-to-point error by up to 5.35 dB over automated baselines and coming within 0.22 dB of a measurement-calibrated, hand-built RFDT.

Maximiliano Wardle, A. Ryo Koblitz

Nokia Bell Labs · University of York

Radio Map Estimation Cognitive Digital Twins Digital Twins Digital Elevation Models Random Forest

Aug 31, 2026cs.CV

HorizonNet for visual terrain navigation

This paper investigates the problem of position estimation of unmanned surface vessels (USVs) operating in coastal areas or in the archipelago. We propose a position estimation method where the horizon line is extracted in a 360 degree panoramic image around the USV. We design a CNN architecture to determine an approximate horizon line in the image and implicitly determine the camera orientation (the pitch and roll angles). The panoramic image is warped to compensate for the camera orientation and to generate an image from an approximately level camera. A second CNN architecture is designed to extract the pixelwise horizon line in the warped image. The extracted horizon line is correlated with digital elevation model (DEM) data in the Fourier domain using a MOSSE correlation filter. Finally, we determine the location of the maximum correlation score over the search area to estimate the position of the USV. Comprehensive experiments are performed in a field trial in the archipelago. Our approach provides promising results by achieving position estimates with GPS-level accuracy.

Bertil Grelsson, Andreas Robinson, Michael Felsberg +1

Computer Vision Laboratory, Department of Electrical Engineering, Linköping University, Sweden · Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Abu Dhabi, UAE

Drone-View Geo-Localization Ship Detection Digital Elevation Models Horizon Navigation Convolutional Neural Networks

Aug 20, 2026cs.LG

StationPDE: Station-Oriented Surface PDE Learning for Multi-Station Multivariate Weather Forecasting

Multi-station multivariate weather forecasting aims to forecast future weather variables at multiple weather stations from historical surface observations. Existing station forecasting models learn statistical dependencies among discrete stations, but lack explicit physical evolution. Meanwhile, PDE-based weather models provide interpretable physical dynamics, yet require continuous fields and upper-air variables unavailable in surface station data. To bridge this gap, we propose StationPDE, a station-oriented surface PDE learning model. StationPDE constructs a terrain-aware continuous surface field from discrete station observations and decomposes its physical evolution into surface wind transport and upper-air inference. Surface wind transport explicitly evolves observable weather variables, while upper-air inference uses learnable horizontal diffusion to approximate the missing influence of unavailable upper-air variables. A parallel data-driven diffusion branch captures complementary motion patterns, and an adaptive router integrates the two forecasts for station-level multivariate forecasting. Experiments on Weather2K and MeteoNet show that StationPDE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, reducing MSE by about

9.6\%

on average compared with the strongest baseline.

Xiao Wang, Changjian Chen, Rongwen Li +3

Hunan University.

Weather Prediction Spatio-Temporal Forecasting Wind Partial Differential Equations Digital Elevation Models

Aug 4, 2026cs.CV

TRNet: Topography-Guided Frequency Rectification and Structure-Aware Decoding for Multimodal Paddy Rice Segmentation

Mapping paddy rice from very-high-resolution imagery in mountainous and hilly regions is difficult because terrain alters optical appearance and increases confusion with visually similar vegetation. We present TRNet for 0.5-m GaoJing-1 red--green--blue (RGB) imagery, a 5-m TanDEM-X digital elevation model (DEM), and derived slope. Separate visual and terrain encoders preserve modality-specific features. At an early encoder stage, Topographic Energy-Spectral Rectification applies terrain-conditioned low-frequency modulation and asymmetric high-frequency regulation to suppress steep-slope clutter and conditionally enhance compatible low-slope rice cues. The Topography-guided Paddy Structure Decoder combines semantic, rice--background boundary, and interior cues, using coarse terrain as context. Experiments used an Area A internal test set and held-out Area B, which had steeper terrain and lower rice prevalence. TRNet achieved rice intersection-over-union (IoU) values of 85.10% and 80.68%, exceeding the original Dual-Encoder U-Net by 9.15 and 18.83 percentage points, respectively. Ablation and slope-stratified results linked these gains to frequency rectification, structure learning, and fewer steep-terrain false positives. The results support coarse topography as a contextual prior for very-high-resolution paddy rice mapping.

Kaiwen Xiao, Chunlong Fu, Liping Zheng +1

School of Computer Science, Sichuan University Jinjiang College, Meishan 620860, China

Digital Elevation Models Terrain Structure-Aware

Jul 17, 2026cs.RO

PRISM: Multimodal Terrain Mapping for Rover Navigation in Unstructured Environments

Robotic navigation in unstructured environments requires robust situational awareness to safely traverse hazards such as steep slopes and rocky terrain. To address this challenge, perception systems increasingly rely on multimodal sensor fusion. Specifically, integrating thermal imagery with standard optical and depth sensors enhances terrain differentiation, directly improving the reliability of mapping algorithms. This paper presents PRISM, a multimodal perception system for terrain mapping in unstructured settings. PRISM leverages a custom sensor suite to capture aligned RGB, depth, and thermal (RGB-D-T) imagery. At its core is OmniUnet, a novel vision transformer-based network specifically designed for multimodal semantic terrain segmentation. We validated the proposed system using two newly annotated datasets (BASEPROD and LAENTIEC) and demonstrate its real-world applicability through physical field experiments. Deployed on a resource-constrained embedded computer, PRISM efficiently generates traversability maps that directly enable autonomous navigation via a rover's Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) subsystem.

Raul Castilla-Arquillo, Carlos Perez-del-Pulgar, Levin Gerdes +2

Space Robotics (SpaceR) Research Group, SnT, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Luxembourg · Department of Automation and Systems Engineering, Universidad de Málaga, Andalucia Tech, 29070 Málaga, Spain

Digital Elevation Models Terrain Robot Navigation Autonomous Surface Vehicles Situational Awareness Dynamic Environments+1

Jul 9, 2026cs.CV

LTM: Large-scale Terrain Model for Wildfire-prone Landscapes

Accurate 3D terrain maps are essential for emergency response when assessing wildfire hazards. However, wildfire-prone regions often span vast areas where conventional reconstruction methods underperform. Airborne LiDAR systems provide high-resolution terrain data, but they are expensive and infrequently updated. Image-based methods offer a lower-cost alternative, but struggle due to sparse visual features and limited image overlap. We propose a multi-modal reconstruction framework leveraging outdated Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) as geometric priors for image-based 3D reconstruction. Our key innovation is physics-based pixel-pixel alignment between images and DEM data, dramatically reducing computational complexity by eliminating expensive feature matching procedures. To validate our approach, we developed a large-terrain simulator based on a real wildfire-prone area, generating realistic images enabling a comprehensive evaluation. Given posed images and legacy DEMs, our method produces high-fidelity depth maps while maintaining real-time performance. We find significant improvements in reconstruction accuracy and computational efficiency over existing techniques, offering a scalable solution for wildfire response.

Xiao Fu, Yue Hu, Meida Chen +2

University of Southern California

Digital Elevation Models Wildfire Prediction Wildfire Terrain Long-Term Memory

Jun 19, 2026cs.RO

LOGOS: LiDAR-Only Gaussian Elevation Splatting for Unified Tiny Obstacle Segmentation

Robust obstacle segmentation is essential for the safety of intelligent robots, where LiDAR-based perception systems play a fundamental role in the robot-environment interaction. While extensive LiDAR-based approaches have demonstrated high performance on common obstacles in urban scenarios, their results on tiny obstacles such as curbs, gravel, and potholes remain unsatisfactory due to the significant similarity between tiny obstacles and inherent road undulations. Moreover, their segmentation accuracy even deteriorates sharply when the LiDAR scans suffer from degradation in challenging off-road scenes. To overcome these bottlenecks, we propose LOGOS, a LiDAR-only unified tiny obstacle segmentation system, which models the road surface as a continuous mixture of 2D Gaussian primitives and distinguishes tiny obstacles via high-presicion elevation estimation. Unlike existing Gaussian splatting methods that rely on iterative RGB training, LOGOS is a backpropagation-free LiDAR-only approach. It directly estimates Gaussian parameters via a freespace-aware initialization by incrementally pruning non-road primitives using smoothness constraints. Subsequently, pointwise signed distances are computed via a novel normal-aware elevation splatting function, ensuring robustness to both flat and sloped terrains. We evaluate LOGOS on a highly heterogeneous benchmark of point cloud frames collected from urban mobility scenarios and mining haulage off-road environments. These data are practically acquired using different LiDAR sensors and exhibit large variations in point density, terrain roughness, and obstacle types. Experiments on the road and off-road scenes demonstrate that LOGOS significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods, particularly in degraded point cloud regions and challenging off-road scenarios, while maintaining real-time efficiency.

Nan Ming, Yeqiang Qian, Chunxiang Wang +1

School of Automation and Intelligent Sensing, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China · Key Laboratory of System Control and Information Processing, Ministry of Education, Shanghai, 200240, China

Lidar Obstacle Avoidance Point Clouds Robotic Perception Digital Elevation Models

Jun 16, 2026cs.RO

RICH-SLAM: Radar SLAM with Incremental and Continuous Hilbert Mapping

Simultaneous localization and mapping using radar sensors has gained increasing attention due to radar's inherent robustness to adverse weather and lighting conditions. However, radar measurements are characteristically sparse and noisy compared to LiDAR and visual data, posing significant challenges in achieving dense, continuous, and consistent map representations. In this paper, we present RICH-SLAM, a radar SLAM framework designed to address these challenges. Our approach features a Rao-Blackwellized particle filter-based back end that employs particle filtering for pose estimation and Kalman filtering for map updates. We propose an incremental Hilbert-space reduced-rank Gaussian process mapping strategy that enables continuous and uncertainty-aware map representations given sparse radar inputs. We further introduce a posterior-aware particle weighting scheme that leverages the full posterior distribution of map parameters for more robust likelihood evaluation. Experiments on self-collected and public ColoRadar datasets show that RICH-SLAM constructs continuous occupancy maps from sparse radar measurements and supports uncertainty-aware planning for mobile robots.

Bingbing Zhang, Huan Yin, Yang Xu +4

State Key Laboratory of Ocean Sensing, Zhejiang University, China · Interdisciplinary Student Training Platform for Marine areas, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China · Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong +3

Simultaneous Localization And Mapping Digital Elevation Models Gaussian Process

Jun 15, 2026cs.CV

Contrastive Learning for Seismic Horizon Tracking with Domain-Specific Priors

Unsupervised 3D seismic horizon tracking faces a key limitation: signal-based propagators provide accurate trace-level alignment but often fail near faults, whereas texture-driven deep models are more robust to discontinuities, typically at the cost of labeled data requirements and reduced trace-level precision. We propose a self-supervised fusion of both paradigms in which signal-derived local horizon correspondences act as domain-specific priors to train a texture-based deep learning model. Specifically, we estimate reliable trace-to-trace flows from reflector slopes and use them to form positive pairs in a contrastive objective, while restricting training to high-confidence neighborhoods, optionally augmented with a fault mask. The objective is not to infer ambiguous correspondences close to discontinuities, but to preserve horizon identity across them. As a result, the network learns voxel-wise embeddings that preserve local signal continuity while enabling horizon propagation beyond discontinuities through similarity search. Experiments on the public F3 dataset and a faulted synthetic dataset achieve lower mean absolute error (MAE) than unsupervised baselines and competitive performance against a semi-supervised method using a single labeled slice.

Alexandre Thouvenot, Lionel Boillot, Vincent Gripon

IMT Atlantique, LAB-STICC, UMR CNRS 6285, F-29238 Brest, France · TotalEnergies, OneTech, 64000 Pau, France

Full Waveform Inversion Digital Elevation Models Ground-Truth Correspondence Horizon Pixel-Level Prediction Contrastive Learning+1

Jun 12, 2026cs.CV

Improving Lunar Topography with Deep Learning Schrödinger Bridges

Increasing the resolution of planetary topography models can enable a better understanding of surface processes and geomorphology; however, existing analytical super-resolution methods are expensive and difficult to apply at large scales. Generative models provide the tools to learn complex relationships within data and can be applied at scale due to hardware accelerators and parallelization. We present a diffusion-based Schrödinger Bridge (SB) generative modeling approach for lunar topography super-resolution, connecting the distribution of low-resolution topography to that of high-resolution topography, incorporating physically-constraining optical imagery. Our approach is inspired by existing Shape-from-Shading methods, which improve a priori low-resolution topography by using optical images at the target resolution. We train SBs on a novel dataset of rendered lunar topography, emulating optical imagery from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Narrow Angle Camera. The result is a flexible approach for topography super-resolution which can provide pixel-level uncertainties in the reconstruction.

Matthew Repasky, Erwan Mazarico, Michael K. Barker +3

H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA · NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, USA · Center for Research and Exploration in Space Science and Technology (CRESST II), University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA +1

Generative Super-Resolution Digital Elevation Models Rosetta Schrödinger Bridges Satellite Imagery Pixel-Level Prediction+2

Jun 11, 2026cs.LG

To GAN or Not To GAN: Segmentation Analysis on Mars DEM

To better understand Martian Surface, which is needed to enable Rovers navigate Mars with ease, it is necessary to be able to determine the location of mounds. Detecting and studying these morphologies can also help us find evidence of extraterrestrial life, in this case, more specifically, water or signs of life conducive environments. Detection of mounds was done by manually mapping morphological parameters onto Digital Elevation Models. This paper solves the problem by automatically detecting and or predicting mounds on Mars using Neural Network based Semantic Segmentation methodologies. This is done by using supervised semantic segmentation model and generative adversarial approach. A comparison of the approaches shows that adding extra artificially generated data did not improve the result.

Douglas Dziedzorm Agbeve, Aditya V. Handrale, Salim Fares +1

University of Passau

Semantic Segmentation Digital Elevation Models Rosetta Generative Adversarial Network Morphology Ridge

Jun 9, 2026cs.RO

Multi-UAV Active Sensing with Information Gain-based Planning and Belief Fusion

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used for active sensing and information gathering in spatially distributed environments. Their performance, however, is constrained by limited flight time, sensing uncertainty, and the trade-off between spatial coverage and observation accuracy. This paper presents a real-world validation of a multi-UAV active sensing framework for probabilistic binary terrain mapping, with precision agriculture used as the application case. The environment is represented as a probabilistic belief map, where spatial dependencies are modeled through a factor-graph formulation. UAV decision making is guided by Information Gain based Informative Path Planning (IGbIPP), and the approach is compared with Random Walk and Sweep coverage path planning baselines using both synthetic terrains and real UAV-derived agricultural imagery. The study also evaluates spatial correlation weights and several probabilistic belief-fusion rules for multi-UAV information sharing. Results show that IGbIPP reduces entropy and mapping error more effectively than the baselines, while a wider field of view improves real-world coverage and map accuracy. The results further show that simple equal or biased spatial weights can be more robust than adaptive weights, and that Bayesian, log-odds, and Dempster--Shafer fusion achieve the best cooperative mapping performance. These findings highlight the importance of uncertainty-driven planning, sensing geometry, spatial modeling, and probabilistic fusion for real-world UAV-based active sensing.

S. Habibi, L. Marques

Institute of Systems and Robotics University of Coimbra, 3030-290 Coimbra, Portugal

Multi-Uav Aerial Imagery Digital Elevation Models Classical Planning

Jun 8, 2026q-bio.NC

Discovering Functionally Selective Brain Regions with a Deep Topographic Multimodal Model

Nearby neurons in cortex share similar response profiles, producing systematic spatial organization across sensory and cognitive systems. Recent topographic models reproduce aspects of this structure but remain unimodal and spatially constrain each layer separately, yielding fragmented maps that capture neither the contiguity of cortical processing streams nor their integration across modalities. We introduce Topo-Omni, a topographic multimodal model in which visual, auditory, and language/cognitive processing share a single contiguous in-silico sheet. Built by fine-tuning a pretrained foundation model with a spatial smoothness objective, this architecture develops clusters across modalities that are consistent with human neuroimaging, from sensory to cognitive systems. Driving or suppressing a cluster selectively biases or impairs perception, paralleling human intervention studies. Finally, we use our model to screen for novel clusters in-silico and discover new natural landscape and animal networks which we validate in human data. A single spatial principle thus organizes representations across modalities and processing stages, yielding testable hypotheses about cortical organization.

Badr AlKhamissi, Johannes Mehrer, Lara Marinov +3

NeuroAI Lab, EPFL

Human Visual Cortex Perception Digital Elevation Models Region

May 22, 2026cs.RO

Multi-Floor Exploration for Ground Robots via an Incremental Reachable Graph and Structural Priors

Autonomous exploration of multi-floor buildings remains challenging for ground robots because conventional 2D and 2.5D maps cannot represent overlapping traversable surfaces such as stairs, ramps, and multiple reachable elevations. This letter presents a multi-floor exploration framework based on an incremental reachable graph. Built as a sparse graph over reachable support surfaces, the graph preserves potentially valid connectivity through tentative graph elements under sparse observations and enables stable, physically reachable frontier detection. To guide exploration beyond the currently mapped floor, we project task-zone priors from an explored floor to initialize a hypothetical graph on the target floor and reconcile it incrementally with incoming observations. A hierarchical planner then jointly reasons over confirmed and hypothetical structures for global guidance. In simulation, the proposed method demonstrates improved exploration efficiency and mapping completeness compared to evaluated baselines. Furthermore, onboard real-world experiments validate its practical feasibility and real-time performance.

Zhiwen Zhu, Jiaqi Chen, Xiangyi Huang +2

Digital Elevation Models Exploration

May 21, 2026cs.LG

ImplicitTerrainV2: Wavelet-Guided Spatially Adaptive Neural Terrain Representation

Digital elevation models (DEMs) underpin terrain analysis in Geographic Information Systems (GIS), but in their common raster form, they rely on interpolation for off-grid sampling and finite-difference operators for derivative-based analysis. Implicit neural representations (INRs) offer a continuous alternative, but prior terrain INRs lack explicit frequency control, neglect the gradient structure of terrain, and remain too large and costly to train for practical deployment. We present ImplicitTerrainV2, which advances terrain INRs toward a compact, efficient neural terrain data format by combining a spectral control mechanism with wavelet-guided spatial adaptivity, derivative-aware supervision, and post-training model compression. At its core, a wavelet complexity field (WCF) derives spatially-adaptive frequency masks from analytically computed wavelet coefficients, localizing high-frequency capacity to complex terrain regions. The same field guides complexity-aware adaptive sampling that concentrates training in high-complexity regions, while gradient matching applies extra supervision to enforce the smooth manifold structure of terrain DEMs for improved derivative fidelity. Post-training mixed-precision quantization and entropy coding reduce storage to 1.23 bpp with a 0.28 dB PSNR drop. On 50 Swiss terrain tiles, ImplicitTerrainV2 reaches 66.25 dB end-to-end PSNR, improving over the prior work by 5.70 dB while using 3.2x fewer parameters and training in 55 s per tile on a single GPU. Our compressed neural format is competitive with several established DEM codecs in rate-distortion performance, while additionally supporting off-grid point queries, closed-form derivative evaluation, and resolution-independent reconstruction, which may benefit many downstream GIS applications.

Haoan Feng, Xin Xu, Leila De Floriani

University of Maryland, College Park MD, USA

Digital Elevation Models Neural Representations Wavelets Terrain Discretization

May 14, 2026cs.CV

D2-CDIG: Controlled Diffusion Remote Sensing Image Generation with Dual Priors of DEM and Cloud-Fog

Remote sensing image generation provides a reliable data foundation for remote sensing large models and downstream tasks. However, existing controllable remote sensing image generation methods typically rely on traditional techniques such as segmentation and edge detection, which do not fully leverage terrain or atmospheric conditions. As a result, the generated images often lack accuracy and naturalness when dealing with complex terrains and atmospheric phenomena. In this paper, we propose a novel remote sensing image generation framework, D2-CDIG, which integrates diffusion models with a dual-prior control mechanism. By incorporating both Digital Elevation Model (DEM) and cloud-fog information as dual prior knowledge, D2-CDIG precisely controls ground features and atmospheric phenomena within the generated images. Specifically, D2-CDIG decouples the terrain and atmospheric generation processes through independent control of ground and atmospheric branches. Additionally, a refined cloud-fog slider is introduced to flexibly adjust cloud thickness and distribution. During training, ground and atmospheric control signals are injected in layers to ensure a seamless transition within the images. Compared to traditional methods based on segmentation or edge detection, D2-CDIG shows significant improvements in image quality, detail richness, and realism. D2-CDIG offers a flexible and precise solution for remote sensing image generation, providing high-quality data for training large remote sensing models and downstream tasks.

Zuopeng Zhao, Ying Liu, Kanyaphakphachsorn Pharksuwan +3

School of Computer Science and Technology/School of Artificial Intelligence, China University of Mining and Technology, Xuzhou 221116, China

Remote Sensing Digital Elevation Models Fog Image Generation Prior Knowledge Integration

May 8, 2026cs.CV

Geometric Flood Depth Estimation: Fusing Transformer-Based Segmentation with Digital Elevation Models

Post-disaster situational awareness relies heavily on understanding both the extent and the volume of floodwaters. While 2D semantic segmentation provides accurate flood masking, it lacks the vertical dimension required to assess navigability and structural risk. This paper presents a geometric "Water Surface Elevation" approach for estimating flood depth from monocular aerial imagery. Our pipeline utilizes Mask2Former, a state-of-the-art transformer-based segmentation model, to generate precise 2D flood masks. These masks are fused with Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) to identify the water-land boundary, calculate a global water surface elevation (

Z_{water}

), and compute per-pixel depth based on the principle of local hydrostatic equilibrium. We evaluate this workflow using the FloodNet and CRASAR-U-DROIDS datasets, demonstrating how high-performance segmentation can be leveraged to extract 3D volumetric data from 2D imagery without the latency of hydrodynamic simulations.

Nhut Le, Ehsan Karimi, Maryam Rahnemoonfar

Lehigh University

Flood Detection Digital Elevation Models Aerial Imagery Semantic Segmentation Sea-Surface Temperature Data

May 8, 2026cs.CV

DPG-CD: Depth-Prior-Guided Cross-Modal Joint 2D-3D Change Detection

Urban spatial evolution is manifested not only through horizontal expansion but also through vertical structural changes. Consequently, jointly capturing 2D semantic changes and 3D height changes is essential for urban morphology analysis and emergency management. In practical scenarios, collecting 3D observations is often constrained by high acquisition costs and the inability to support frequent updates. The multi-temporal cross-modal input consisting of pre-event Digital Surface Model (DSM) and post-event imagery provides a practical solution for 3D change detection in high-frequency urban monitoring, disaster assessment, and emergency response scenarios. However, this setting remains challenging as imagery and DSM data exhibit significant spectral-geometric representation gaps. Moreover, modality differences may be confused with actual changes, and robust change detection requires effective fusion of semantic and geometric features from multi-temporal data. In this paper, we propose DPG-CD, a depth-prior-guided multi-temporal cross-modal fusion framework for joint 2D semantic and 3D height change detection. Specifically, an estimated depth prior is introduced into the imagery to mitigate the modality gap with DSM. A gated fusion mechanism then selectively injects geometric cues from depth prior while preserving discriminative spectral representations. Subsequently, a multi-stage cross-temporal cross-modal feature fusion architecture is employed to extract change-aware features. Finally, a multi-task decoder jointly predicts 2D semantic changes and 3D height changes, complemented by an auxiliary DSM prediction task to improve structural consistency and height estimation accuracy. Experiments on two public datasets, Hi-BCD and 3DCD, and a new dataset, NYC-MMCD, demonstrate that DPG-CD outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both 2D and 3D change detection tasks.

Luqi Zhang, Zhen Dong, Bisheng Yang

State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, No.129, Luoyu Road, Wuhan, Hubei, 430079, China

Change Detection Digital Elevation Models Multimodal Fusion Post-Disaster Damage Assessment Cross-Modal Urban Environments+1

May 5, 2026eess.SP

Neural Posterior Estimation of Terrain Parameters from Radar Sounder Data

Radar sounders are electromagnetic instruments that can probe deep into the subsurface of Earth and other planetary bodies by processing the echo of transmitted radar waves. Conventional approaches for analyzing such data rely on approximate assumptions and often produce point estimates that ignore parameter correlations as well as galactic and measurement noise. We propose a simulation-based inference approach to terrain parameter inversion from radar sounder data, where synthetic observations from a GPU-based simulator are used to train a neural network-based density estimator for neural posterior estimation (NPE). By explicitly conditioning on reference surface assumptions, the proposed framework allows systematic evaluation of posterior robustness to reference surface variability. We demonstrate that our NPE model is well calibrated on simulated data and transferable to real Mars radar profiles, where we analyze terrain parameters using literature-informed reference values.

Jordy Dal Corso, Annalena Kofler, Marco Cortellazzi +2

University of Trento, Trento, Italy · Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen, Germany · Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute), Potsdam, Germany +1

Radar Digital Elevation Models Terrain Synthetic Data

Apr 23, 2026cs.CV

SparseGF: A Height-Aware Sparse Segmentation Framework with Context Compression for Robust Ground Filtering Across Urban to Natural Scenes

High-quality digital terrain models derived from airborne laser scanning (ALS) data are essential for a wide range of geospatial analyses, and their generation typically relies on robust ground filtering (GF) to separate point clouds across diverse landscapes into ground and non-ground parts. Although current deep-learning-based GF methods have demonstrated impressive performance, especially in specific challenging terrains, their cross-scene generalization remains limited by two persistent issues: the context-detail dilemma in large-scale processing due to limited computational resources, and the random misclassification of tall objects arising from classification-only optimization. To overcome these limitations, we propose SparseGF, a height-aware sparse segmentation framework enhanced with context compression. It is built upon three key innovations: (1) a convex-mirror-inspired context compression module that condenses expansive contexts into compact representations while preserving central details; (2) a hybrid sparse voxel-point network architecture that effectively interprets compressed representations while mitigating compression-induced geometric distortion; and (3) a height-aware loss function that explicitly enforces topographic elevation priors during training to suppress random misclassification of tall objects. Extensive evaluations on two large-scale ALS benchmark datasets demonstrate that SparseGF delivers robust GF across urban to natural terrains, achieving leading performance in complex urban scenes, competitive results on mixed terrains, and moderate yet non-catastrophic accuracy in densely forested steep areas. This work offers new insights into deep-learning-based GF research and encourages further exploration toward truly cross-scene generalization for large-scale environmental monitoring.

Nannan Qin, Pengjie Tao, Haiyan Guan +4

School of Remote Sensing and Geomatics Engineering, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, 210044, JiangSu, China · Tiandu-Nuist Deep Space Exploration Laboratory, Nanjing, 210044, JiangSu, China · School of Remote Sensing and Information Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430079, Hubei, China +4

Digital Elevation Models Light Detection And Ranging Point Clouds Voxel Terrain Cities Data Compression Methods

Apr 22, 2026cs.CV

LunarDepthNet: Generation of Digital Elevation Models using Deep Learning and Monocular Satellite Images

Recent times have seen an increase in demand of high quality Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) for the lunar surface, because they are highly important for studying the moon and planning future missions. However, there is an evident lack of detailed elevation data on the Moon. To overcome this limitation, this study proposes a novel deep learning method that estimates and generates a surface elevation map directly from monocular images of the surface. The dataset used comprises of the Chandrayaan-2 Terrain Mapping Camera (TMC) images with their corresponding Digital Terrain Models (DTMs). The study proposes LunarDepthNet, which comprises of a UNet architecture to generate DEMS. It incorporates an EfficientNet encoder and custom layers to correctly learn how the light shadows on the surface relate to the actual elevation values. A combined loss function was also utilized to keep the terrain details accurate and smooth. During validation, the model showed a stable loss convergence of 12%. It achieved a mean nRMSE of 0.437 and an MAE of 4.5m in the testing stage. These results prove the model can generate dependable elevation maps from single orbital images, which are quite useful in regions of the moon where stereo-images are not available.

Aaranay Aadi, Jai Gopal Singla, Amitabh +3

School of Computer Science and Engineering Manipal University Jaipur Jaipur, India · Space Applications Centre (SAC) Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Ahmedabad, India · Department of IoT and Intelligent Systems Manipal University Jaipur Jaipur, India +1

Digital Elevation Models Rosetta Deep Learning

Apr 19, 2026cs.CV

DEM Refinement and Validation on the Lunar Surface Using Shape-from-Shading with Chandrayaan-2 OHRC Imagery

This study presents a Shape from Shading (SfS) framework to enhance sub-metre resolution lunar digital elevation models (DEMs) using imagery from the Orbiter High Resolution Camera (OHRC) aboard Chandrayaan-2. The framework applies SfS to an independent OHRC image of the same region, enabling SfS not just as a refinement tool, but as a source of new topographic data, unconstrained by stereo baseline limitations. The method is applied across three lunar sites, including the Cyrillus crater, the Vikram landing region, and the lunar south pole (Mons Mouton), with a systematic three-stage parameter sweep on the SfS smoothness weight. Results show measurable topographic enhancement, particularly in surface slope statistics, revealing fine-scale crater morphology previously unresolved. A limiting case is also characterized, where large pitch angle separation between the shading image and stereo pair reduces SfS sensitivity, and partial footprint coverage of the shading image is identified as a factor influencing spatially variable enhancement quality.

Aaranay Aadi, Jai Gopal Singla, Nitant Dube

School of Computer Science and Engineering, Manipal University Jaipur Jaipur, India · Space Applications Centre (SAC), Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Ahmedabad, India

Rosetta Digital Elevation Models

Jan 13, 2026cs.RO

Agile and Generalized Legged Locomotion via Attention-Based Neural Map Encoding

Achieving agile and generalized legged locomotion across terrains requires tight integration of perception and control, especially under occlusions and sparse footholds. Existing methods have demonstrated agility on parkour courses but often rely on end-to-end sensorimotor models with limited generalization and interpretability. By contrast, methods targeting generalized locomotion typically exhibit limited agility and struggle with visual occlusions. We introduce a unified reinforcement learning (RL) framework for agile and generalized locomotion that incorporates a novel attention-based map encoder in the control policy. This encoder extracts local and global mapping features and uses attention mechanisms to focus on salient regions, producing an interpretable and generalized embedding for RL-based control. We further propose a learning-based mapping pipeline that provides fast, uncertainty-aware terrain representations robust to noise and occlusions, serving as policy inputs. It uses neural networks to convert depth observations into local elevations with uncertainties, and fuses them with odometry. The pipeline also integrates with parallel simulation so that we can train controllers with online mapping, aiding sim-to-real transfer. We validate our framework with the proposed mapping pipeline on a quadruped and a biped robot, and the resulting controllers demonstrate strong agility and generalization to unseen terrains in simulation and in real-world experiments.

Chong Zhang, Victor Klemm, Fan Yang +1

1Robotic Systems Lab, ETH Zurich, Switzerland · 2Secure, Reliable, and Intelligent Systems Lab, ETH Zurich, Switzerland · 3ETH AI Center, Switzerland

Agile Locomotion Sensorimotor Experience Offline Reinforcement Learning Digital Elevation Models

Nov 4, 2025cs.CV

Automatic Extraction of Road Networks by using Teacher-Student Adaptive Structural Deep Belief Network and Its Application to Landslide Disaster

An adaptive structural learning method of Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) and Deep Belief Network (DBN) has been developed as one of prominent deep learning models. The neuron generation-annihilation algorithm in RBM and layer generation algorithm in DBN make an optimal network structure for given input during the learning. In this paper, our model is applied to an automatic recognition method of road network system, called RoadTracer. RoadTracer can generate a road map on the ground surface from aerial photograph data. A novel method of RoadTracer using the Teacher-Student based ensemble learning model of Adaptive DBN is proposed, since the road maps contain many complicated features so that a model with high representation power to detect should be required. The experimental results showed the detection accuracy of the proposed model was improved from 40.0% to 89.0% on average in the seven major cities among the test dataset. In addition, we challenged to apply our method to the detection of available roads when landslide by natural disaster is occurred, in order to rapidly obtain a way of transportation. For fast inference, a small size of the trained model was implemented on a small embedded edge device as lightweight deep learning. We reported the detection results for the satellite image before and after the rainfall disaster in Japan. This version of the article was improved the search algorithm at the border around image.

Shin Kamada, Takumi Ichimura

S. Kamada is with Hiroshima City University, Hiroshima, Japan · T. Ichimura is with Prefectural University of Hiroshima, Hiroshima, Japan

Landslides Road Networks Modern Deep Networks Edge-Aware Digital Elevation Models Singular Learning Theory+1