Image-based surface reconstruction in geomorphometry &ndash; merits, limits and  developments

Eltner, Anette; Kaiser, Andreas; Castillo, Carlos; Rock, Gilles; Neugirg, Fabian; Abellán, Antonio

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/esurf-4-359-2016

Articles | Volume 4, issue 2

https://doi.org/10.5194/esurf-4-359-2016

© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Special issue:

Frontiers in geomorphometry

https://doi.org/10.5194/esurf-4-359-2016

© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 4, issue 2

Review article

|

19 May 2016

Review article |

| 19 May 2016

Image-based surface reconstruction in geomorphometry – merits, limits and developments

Anette Eltner, Andreas Kaiser, Carlos Castillo, Gilles Rock, Fabian Neugirg, and Antonio Abellán

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Final revised paper (published on 19 May 2016)
Preprint (discussion started on 15 Dec 2015)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

RC C596: 'Comments_esurfd-3-1445-2015', Anonymous Referee #1, 08 Jan 2016
- AC C704: 'reply to referee 1', Anette Eltner, 16 Mar 2016
RC C614: 'Review of Eltner et al. - Image-based surface reconstruction in geomorphometry', Matthew Westoby, 11 Jan 2016
- AC C720: 'reply to referee Matt Westoby', Anette Eltner, 16 Mar 2016
EC C728: 'Editor comment on the manuscript "Image-based surface reconstruction in geomorphometry – merits, limits and developments of a promising tool for geoscientists"', Giulia Sofia, 16 Mar 2016

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Anette Eltner on behalf of the Authors (16 Mar 2016) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (17 Mar 2016) by Giulia Sofia

RR by Matthew Westoby (12 Apr 2016)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

I am generally satisfied that Eltner and co-authors have addressed the majority of concerns raised by myself and another reviewer in their revised manuscript. I have a number of minor points to raise, which are listed below.

General comment – the standard of written English needs some work throughout. In places it can detract from the flow of the article – I would suggest further proofreading to improve if possible.

L31 – add a reference here to Lowe’s SIFT work

L47 – any references to support this?

L51 – how is it driven by digital sensors? What aspects of these technologies? Cost? Ease of use? Please be more specific for the reader.

L69 – you don’t mention here the range of temporal or spatial scales that can be captured and I think that you need to. The wording is quite vague. It would help to put numbers to these scales – e.g. millimetric to kilometric for spatial scale, and, I suppose, survey visit scales of minutes or pretty much any interval longer than this?

L94 – remove ‘great’ – suggest replace with ‘valuable’, or similar.

L149 – typo for Helmert transformation

L199 – what does ‘APERO’ do? Please describe very briefly at the end of this sentence. Ah, you mention this at L217 – perhaps shift this text earlier to match first usage.

L225 – you could just name this section ‘Key developments in SfM photogrammetry’

Sections 3 and 4 – Whilst the authors have taken on board the reviewers’ comments and have performed some restructuring of the manuscript, more could be done to improve it further. For example, I do not understand why the content of section 3.2 and section 5 appear in different sections. At present, the authors talk about error analysis in section 3.2, then describe the various applications of SfM by sub-discipline, and then return to error analysis again in section 5. This is very confusing and does not flow well. The text/discussion for both of these ‘error analysis’ sections needs combining, and should come after current section 4 – i.e. integrate the text from section 3.2 into section 5.

L447 – these sub-sub-sections need numbering as well as per the ESD manuscript formatting guidelines.

L784 – this paragraph/section is very, very short – I would request that the authors either expand this section or integrate the text into another section as appropriate.

L792 – exactly how has the development of open-source software (e.g. CloudCompare) ‘boosted’ geomorphometric studies? Please be more specific – do you mean because these types of software can easily handle massive datasets containing tens of millions of points (or more?), whereas this has been an obstacle for researchers previously?

L805 – should be ‘Google Street View’

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RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (20 Apr 2016)

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by Editor) (25 Apr 2016) by Giulia Sofia

AR by Anette Eltner on behalf of the Authors (28 Apr 2016) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (04 May 2016) by Giulia Sofia

ED: Publish as is (09 May 2016) by Niels Hovius (Editor)

AR by Anette Eltner on behalf of the Authors (09 May 2016)

Short summary

Three-dimensional reconstruction of earth surfaces from overlapping images is a promising tool...