Automatic Levee Extraction along Rivers from High Resolution Terrain Models

To plan nature restoration of fluvial corridors on a national level an inventory of existing man-made levees is mandatory. We suggest an automatic method for a river-wise extraction of levees from a high resolution terrain model based on profiles perpendicular to the river axis. This includes a method to cover corridors with non overlapping profiles with a given maximum distance. Levee detection is based on a mathematical formulation of the protective function of levees, i.e. negative elevation differences in outward direction. In an evaluation of 150 km river length distributed over nine different rivers in Austria the method detected 98% of manually extracted levees, and 68% of their length.