The effect of LiDAR data density on DEM accuracy

Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) play an important role in terrain related applications, and their accuracy is crucial for DEM applications. There are many factors that affect the accuracy of DEMs, with the main factors including the accuracy, density and distribution of the source data, the interpolation algorithm, and the DEM resolution. Generally speaking, the more accurate and the denser the sampled terrain data are, the more accurate the produced DEM will be. Traditional methods such as field surveying and photogrammetry can yield high accuracy terrain data, but are very time consuming and labour intensive. Moreover, in some situations such as in densely forested areas, it is impossible to use these methods for collecting elevation data. Ligh