Quality control in digital terrain models

This article is based on digital terrain models (DTMs) and their applications in civil engineering carried out at the Public University of Navarre. One of the drawbacks of the use of these synthetic surfaces is the need to characterize their quality, a very important issue for its economic importance but difficult to determine in a nonempirical manner. We will review the techniques most commonly used to estimate the quality of the models and propose a new method for the control of the quality of DTM in applications for which a high accuracy is required. Among the advantages of this method is that no reference model is needed, and there is a possibility of estimating the errors obtained when using a DTM. The proposed method offers good results and adequately allows one to characterize the roughness of the surfaces evaluated. The sensitivity analysis of the model shows that the volumetric errors are highly sensitive to the density of points sampled, while the height errors remain highly stable.