Generation of Synthetic Elevation Models and Realistic Surface Images of River Deltas and Coastal Terrains Using cGANs

Abstract

Terrain generation aims to automatize the procedure of creating landscapes using a computer system. The generation models must follow different terrains' topographical features, such as areas with river deltas and other regions where water bodies affect the natural landscapes. It is possible to generate more realistic terrains thanks to improvements in computer graphics techniques and deep learning models that use specific hardware. However, the advance on the generation of terrains that include river deltas, fjords, and waterfalls has not had the same pace as other more studied landscapes. Therefore, as a contribution to the advance of the research of terrain generation with water bodies using generative models, this paper presents the DRCA2020 dataset, which is useful for supervised training. The proposed dataset contains eight different types of real-world satellite images. These images are grouped by the same geographical location. There are 13,184 groups; each one has three RGB surface images, a water coverage map, three binarizations of water coverage, and a digital elevation model (DEM). Additionally, this paper proposes the use of a cGAN composite model, trained with the DRCA2020 dataset, for generating synthetic DEMs from water coverage images and therefore, to create realistic surface texture images with promising validation results.

Keywords

• cGANs
• generative model
• river delta
• river delta dataset
• satellite imagery
• terrain generation