Preparing an urban test site for SRTM data validation

In this paper, we describe a method to obtain a reliable set of elevation data suitable for data validation on the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM), starting from laser scanning measurements on an urban test site: Pavia, Northern Italy. The elevation dataset is obtained through extraction of digital terrain models. The source digital surface model is first filtered by means of a lowpass or morphological kernel. Then, buildings are suppressed through analysis of the height histogram. Finally, a lowpass filter suppresses the surviving elevation artifacts. We show that, starting from a digital surface model at 1-m ground resolution, we end up with a digital terrain model that can be used as a ground truth for SRTM topographic analysis of an urban area.