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

Download

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

- Printer-friendly version

- 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’

Hide

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 for geoscientists. The method is very flexible, cost-efficient and easy to use, leading to a high variability in applications at different scales. Performance evaluation reveals that good accuracies are achievable but depend on the requirements of the individual case study. Future applications and developments (i.e. big data) will consolidate this essential tool for digital surface mapping.