Impacts of Resampling and Downscaling Digital Elevation Model and Its Morphometric Factors: A Comparison of Hopfield Neural Network, Bilinear, Bicubic, and Kriging Interpolations

The digital elevation model (DEM) and its derived morphometric factors, i.e., slope, aspect, profile and plan curvatures, and topographic wetness index (TWI), are essential for natural hazard modeling and prediction as they provide critical information about the terrain’s characteristics that can influence the likelihood and severity of natural hazards. Therefore, increasing the accuracy of the DEM and its derived factors plays a critical role. The primary aim of this study is to evaluate and compare the effects of resampling and downscaling the DEM from low to medium resolution and from medium to high resolutions using four methods: namely the Hopfield Neural Network (HNN), Bilinear, Bicubic, and Kriging, on five morphometric factors derived from it. A geospatial database was established, comprising five DEMs with different resolutions: specifically, a SRTM DEM with 30 m resolution, a 20 m resolution DEM derived from topographic maps at a scale of 50,000, a 10 m resolution DEM generated from topographic maps at a scale of 10,000, a 5 m resolution DEM created using surveying points with total stations, and a 5 m resolution DEM constructed through drone photogrammetry. The accuracy of the resampling and downscaling was assessed using Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) and mean absolute error (MAE) as statistical metrics. The results indicate that, in the case of downscaling from low to medium resolution, all four methods—HNN, Bilinear, Bicubic, and Kriging—significantly improve the accuracy of slope, aspect, profile and plan curvatures, and TWI. However, for the case of medium to high resolutions, further investigations are needed as the improvement in accuracy observed in the DEMs does not necessarily translate to the improvement of the second derivative morphometric factors such as plan and profile curvatures and TWI. While RMSEs of the first derivatives of DEMs, such as slope and aspect, reduced in a range of 8% to 55% in all five datasets, the RMSEs of curvatures and TWI slightly increased in cases of downscaling and resampling of Dataset 4. Among the four methods, the HNN method provides the highest accuracy, followed by the bicubic method. The statistics showed that in all five cases of the experiment, the HNN downscaling reduced the RMSE and MAE by 55% for the best case and 10% for the worst case for slope, and it reduced the RMSE by 50% for the best case of aspect. Both the HNN and the bicubic methods outperform the Kriging and bilinear methods. Therefore, we highly recommend using the HNN method for downscaling DEMs to produce more accurate morphometric factors, slope, aspect, profile and plan curvatures, and TWI.