Extraction of bajadas from digital elevation models and satellite imagery

A methodology was designed for the extraction of bajadas from the 15 min US Geological Survey digital elevation models and Landsat Thematic Mapper imagery. The method was demonstrated for the Death Valley-California where progressive eastward tilting has enabled the west-side fans to coalesce and form bajadas. First, the drainage that crossed the uplands and the bajadas was extracted from the DEM. The drainage pixels were successively grown by checking the surrounding pixels on the basis of their gradient. It was concluded that for gradient in the interval 2°,11°] the upslope bajadas border was segmented. In order to eliminate the drainage pixels that belonged to the uplands, the drainage pixels were subtracted. Then, the isolated small 8-connected foreground pixels were identified and subtracted too. Finally, region growing was performed again to the remaining pixels with the same growing criterion. Isolated 8-connected background pixels, representing almost flat regions inside bajadas, were identified and merged to the segmented pixels. At the end, by taking into account the spectral response in the satellite image, the downslope border of bajadas was segmented. The extracted polygon was in agreement with the information depicted on (a) the US Geological Survey topographic map of scale 1:100,000 and (b) the satellite image and (c) the polygon classified manually by a photo-interpreter.