Continuous elevation models improve accuracy with less computing cost
Efficient Continuous DEM Reconstruction under Limited Target-Resolution Supervision
Computer Vision and Pattern RecognitionMachine Learning
Summary
High-resolution maps of Earth's surface are important but hard to create because detailed training data is usually only available at low resolution. The authors propose a new method called SCOPE that learns a smooth representation of terrain from these coarse data and can predict finer details efficiently. Their approach separates heavy calculation from the final detailed map creation, making it faster and more accurate than prior methods. The results show better predictions on land and ocean areas even when the model sees new locations or different scales than it trained on.
What this means in practice
- •For geospatial analysts: Generate higher-resolution terrain maps from available low-resolution elevation data with improved accuracy and efficient computation.
- •For marine navigation teams: Create more accurate continuous elevation models for coastal and marine environments to enhance navigation safety and planning.
Authors
Zekai Shi, Meng Zhang, Haokun Zhang, Bo Zhang
Abstract
High-resolution digital elevation models (DEMs) support Earth observation applications, but paired training references are often available only at coarser output resolutions. Reconstructing finer terrain grids therefore requires both effective transfer beyond the supervised scale and control of dense-query computation. To address this problem, SCOPE learns a continuous terrain representation from coarser-resolution pairs. It predicts a latent coefficient field on the low-resolution grid and reuses local Fourier residual functions through basis evaluation and geometry-guided ensemble fusion. This separates high-dimensional coefficient prediction from output-grid construction. Experiments on geographically distributed land--ocean samples assess supervised reconstruction, unseen-scale inference, cross-domain generalization, and theoretical computation. SCOPE leads the compared methods across six metrics in the main supervised-scale evaluation. At an unseen factor three times the training factor, land reconstruction reduces RMSE and MAE by approximately 12\% relative to bicubic interpolation, with errors close to target-scale fine-tuning. Ninefold output density increases counted multiply--accumulate operations by only about 2\%. Frozen-model validation on held-out external marine regions reduces RMSE relative to the DEM-specific implicit baseline EBCF-CDEM by approximately 19\% under self-downsampling and 2\% with cross-product inputs, while also yielding lower RMSE than LIIF-MS in both settings. These results demonstrate the value of reusable coefficient fields for accurate reconstruction beyond the supervised resolution with low incremental arithmetic cost.