Publications related to Terrain cartography

Snowfall deposition in mountainous terrain: a statistical downscaling scheme from high-resolution model data on simulated topographies

One of the primary causes of non-uniform snowfall deposition on the ground in mountainous regions is the preferential deposition of snow, which results from the interaction of near-surface winds with topography and snow particles. However, producing high-r ...

Frontiers Media Sa2024

swissALPS: a Dataset for Imbalanced Land Cover Mapping in Alpine Regions

Valérie Zermatten

Our dataset consists of very high-resolution aerial images (50cm) and a digital elevation model (50cm) that covers approx. 2300 km2 of land above 2000m altitude in the southwestern part of Switzerland. Our land cover labels focus on alpine land cover that ...

IEEE DataPort2023

Downscaling of Historical Wind Fields over Switzerland Using Generative Adversarial Networks

Anthony Christopher Davison, Ophélia Mireille Anna Miralles

Near-surface wind is difficult to estimate using global numerical weather and climate models, because airflow is strongly modified by underlying topography, especially that of a country such as Switzerland. In this article, we use a statistical approach ba ...

2022

Learning to Simulate Realistic LiDARs

Pascal Fua, Benoît Alain René Guillard

Simulating realistic sensors is a challenging part in data generation for autonomous systems, often involving carefully handcrafted sensor design, scene properties, and physics modeling. To alleviate this, we introduce a pipeline for data-driven simulation ...

2022

Gait-dependent Traversability Estimation on the k-rock2 Robot

Auke Ijspeert, Matthew Alfonso Estrada, Mohammadreza Ebrahimi

Assessing the traversability of rugged terrain is a difficult challenge for legged robots, especially when they implement multiple, distinct gaits. We tackle this problem on the k-rock2 amphibious, sprawling gait robot by training a gait-dependent traversa ...

IEEE2022

How Forward-Scattering Snow and Terrain Change the Alpine Radiation Balance With Application to Solar Panels

Michael Lehning, Annelen Kahl

Rough terrain in mid- and high latitudes is often covered with highly reflective snow, giving rise to a very complex transfer of incident sunlight. In order to simplify the radiative transfer in weather and climate models, snow is generally treated as an i ...

2021

Evaluation of Site Errors in LLS Magnetic Direction Finding Caused by Large Hills Using the 3D‐FDTD Technique

Farhad Rachidi-Haeri, Wolfgang Schulz, Hannes Kohlmann

Angle and amplitude estimation errors in magnetic direction finding, called site errors, are important sensor-specific errors in lightning location systems (LLS). They are known to be caused by nearby cables and overhead lines due to induced currents. Due ...

2021

Tessellation and lmprovement of Simplicial Meshes using Neural Networks

Alexis Papagiannopoulos

Modern mesh generation addresses the development of robust algorithms that construct a discrete representation of the geometry into polytopal elements conforming to divergent properties: (i) fidelity to complex geometrical features, (ii) support for high s ...

EPFL2021

Mapping quality prediction for RTK/PPK-equipped micro-drones operating in complex natural environment

Jan Skaloud, Davide Antonio Cucci, Laurent Valentin Jospin, Emmanuel Pierre Quentin Clédat

Drone mapping with GNSS-assisted photogrammetry is a highly efficient method for surveying small -or medium- sized areas. However, the mapping quality is not intuitively predictable, particularly in complex environments (with steep and cluttered terrain), ...

2020

Learning about the vertical structure of radar reflectivity using hydrometeor classes and neural networks in the Swiss Alps

Alexis Berne, Floortje Elisabeth Maria Van den Heuvel, Marco Gabella, Urs Martin Germann

The use of radar for precipitation measurement in mountainous regions is complicated by many factors, especially beam shielding by terrain features, which, for example, reduces the visibility of the shallow precipitation systems during the cold season. Whe ...

2020

FDTD Modeling of Lightning Electromagnetic Field Propagation Over Mountainous Terrain

Marcos Rubinstein, Dongshuai Li

The Full-Wave Finite-Difference-Time-Domain (FDTD) electromagnetic (EM) simulation method can simulate large domains and produce time-marching solutions for arbitrary time-domain sources, making it ideal for many lightning applications. In this paper, a tw ...

IEEE2019

Rendering-dependent compression and quality evaluation for light field contents

Touradj Ebrahimi, Irene Viola

Light field representation promises to overcome the limitations of stereoscopic representation by allowing for a more seamless transition between multiple points of views, thus giving a more faithful representation of 3D scenes. However, in order to take f ...

2019

Calculation of the Grounding Resistance of Structures Located on Elevated Terrain

Marcos Rubinstein, Antonio Sunjerga, Farhad Rachidi-Haeri

We present an analysis of the response of a grounding electrode located on the top of a mountain. Specifically, we derive an analytical solution for the low-frequency response of a hemispheric grounding electrode buried on the top of a cone-shaped mountain ...

2019

Potential and uncertainty of wind energy in the Swiss Alps

Albertus Christiaan Kruyt

Switzerland has committed itself to an ambitious energy strategy. It aims to replace the exist- ing nuclear generation capacity with predominantly indigenous renewable resources. Wind power could play a significant role in this transition, yet the wind res ...

EPFL2019

Learning to Reconstruct Texture-less Deformable Surfaces from a Single View

Pascal Fua, Mathieu Salzmann, Jan Bednarík

Recent years have seen the development of mature solutions for reconstructing deformable surfaces from a single image, provided that they are relatively well-textured. By contrast, recovering the 3D shape of texture-less surfaces remains an open problem, a ...

2018

From the clouds to the ground - Effects of flow-precipitation interactions on snow distribution in complex alpine terrain

Franziska Gerber

Knowledge about the spatial distribution of seasonal snow is essential e.g. to efficiently manage fresh water resources or for hydro-power companies. The large-scale gradient of snow accumulation over mountain ranges is mainly determined by lifting condens ...

EPFL2018

Location Accuracy Evaluation of ToA-Based Lightning Location Systems Over Mountainous Terrain

Farhad Rachidi-Haeri, Marcos Rubinstein, Wolfgang Schulz, Dongshuai Li

In this paper, we analyze the location error of time of arrival (ToA)-based lightning location systems (LLSs) caused by propagation effects over mountainous terrain around the Santis tower located in the Swiss Alps. The study is based on a full-wave three- ...

Amer Geophysical Union2017

A close-ridge small-scale atmospheric flow field and its influence on snow accumulation

Michael Lehning, Franziska Gerber, Sebastian Wilhelm Hoch

The rough, steep, and complex terrain in the alpine environment causes a variety of flow patterns such as blocking, speed-up, or flow separation, which influence precipitation, snow deposition, and ultimately snow distribution on the ground. Cloud-terrain ...

Amer Geophysical Union2017

Penser (par) la carte : l'espace public et la marche à Mumbai et à Tokyo

Carole Thérèse Lanoix

What do Marine Drive and Shibuya have in common? Both the long promenade at the southern end of Mumbai, and the gigantic pedestrian crossing in the heart of the Japanese capital, are places where one walks. This thesis discusses places of convergence and o ...

EPFL2017

Soil Moisture Estimation by SAR in Alpine Fields Using Gaussian Process Regressor Trained by Model Simulations

Jean-Philippe Thiran, Jelena Stamenkovic

In this paper, we address the problem of retrieving soil moisture over a grassland alpine area from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data using a statistical algorithm trained by simulations of a physical model. A time series of C-band VV-polarized Wide Swat ...

Ieee-Inst Electrical Electronics Engineers Inc2017