demcoreg

Python and shell scripts for co-registration of rasters, specifically digital elevation models (DEMs).

Overview

All DEMs have some horizontal and vertical geolocation error. It is important to remove relative offsets when differencing multiple DEMs for elevation change analyses. These tools offer several options to solve this problem. Most solve for the sub-pixel horizontal shift and vertical offset required to minimize errors over "static" control surfaces. The ASP pc_align tool can also solve for more complex transformations with rotations and scaling.

Features

• Multiple co-registration algorithms (ICP, NCC, SAD, Nuth and Kaab [2011])
• Automatic determination of static control surfaces (i.e., exposed bedrock) for arbitrary DEM timestamp
• Least-squares optimization to correct a group of DEMs

Some useful command-line utilities (run with no arguments for usage)

• dem_align.py - robust raster DEM co-registration (e.g., Nuth and Kaab [2011]) for surfaces with variable slope and aspect
• dem_mask.py - generate mask of snow-free rock surfaces using reflectance, LULC, SNODAS, MODSCAG
• pc_align_wrapper.sh - wrapper around NASA Ames Stereo Pipeline pc_align utility for iterative closest point co-registration
• apply_dem_translation.py - update geotransform and remove vertical offset
• compute_diff.py - simple DEM difference calculation
• robust_stats.py - print out robust statistics for sampled DEM differences before/after co-registration
• coreglib.py - implementation of various co-registration algorithms: Nuth and Kaab (2011), normalized cross-correlation with sub-pixel refinement, sum of absolute differences

Examples

dem_mask.py output

filter_glas.py output

dem_align.py

Documentation

http://demcoreg.readthedocs.io

Simple installation

To install the latest release from PyPI (does not include latest updates and bugfixes):

`pip install demcoreg`

Building from latest source (recommended)

Clone the repository and install:

`git clone https://github.com/dshean/demcoreg.git`

If you want to copy exectuable scripts to a local directory (e.g., /usr/local/bin), uncomment the scripts lines in demcoreg/setup.py. Alternatively, append the demcoreg subdirectory to your PATH:

`export PATH=${PATH}:$PWD/demcoreg/demcoreg`

To make this permanent, add that line to your shell config file (e.g., ~/.bashrc), but replace the $PWD with the full path to the cloned demcoreg repository.

Then run:

`pip install -e demcoreg`

The -e flag ("editable mode", setuptools "develop mode") will allow you to modify source code and immediately see changes.

Core requirements

• GDAL/OGR
• NumPy
• pygeotools

Optional requirements (needed for some functionality)

• matplotlib
• SciPy
• NASA Ames Stereo Pipeline (ASP)

License

This project is licensed under the terms of the MIT License.

Citation

If you use any of this software for research applications that result in publications, please cite:

Shean, D. E., O. Alexandrov, Z. Moratto, B. E. Smith, I. R. Joughin, C. C. Porter, Morin, P. J., An automated, open-source pipeline for mass production of digital elevation models (DEMs) from very high-resolution commercial stereo satellite imagery, ISPRS J. Photogramm. Remote Sens, 116, 101-117, doi: 10.1016/j.isprsjprs.2016.03.012, 2016.