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Extraction of Watersheds from Digital Elevation Models Using Mathematical Morphology.

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In this study, a mathematical morphological based algorithm to extract watersheds from Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) is proposed. First, spurious peaks and pits in the DEM are removed by generating a smoothened DEM using morphological smoothening by reconstruction. The pits of the smoothed DEM are extracted by implementing ultimate erosion on the inverted smoothed DEM. The extracted pits are dilated with a size 3 square kernel to smoothen their irregularities. Skeletonization by influence zone is implemented on the dilated pits to extract the watersheds of the DEM. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is tested by implementing it on the Global Digital Elevation Model (GTOPO30) of Great Basin. The proposed watershed extraction algorithm is able to operate effectively on flat areas in DEMs and allows for the fast and effective segmentation of DEMs into their constituent catchments.

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