Automatic Landform Recognition from the Perspective of Watershed Spatial Structure Based on Digital Elevation Models

Abstract

Landform recognition is one of the most significant aspects of geomorphology research, which is the essential tool for landform classification and understanding geomorphological processes. Watershed object-based landform recognition is a new spot in the field of landform recognition. However, in the relevant studies, the quantitative description of the watershed generally focused on the overall terrain features of the watershed, which ignored the spatial structure and topological relationship, and internal mechanism of the watershed. For the first time, we proposed an effective landform recognition method from the perspective of the watershed spatial structure, which is separated from the previous studies that invariably used terrain indices or texture derivatives. The slope spectrum method was used herein to solve the uncertainty issue of the determination on the watershed area. Complex network and P–N terrain, which are two effective methodologies to describe the spatial structure and topological relationship of the watershed, were adopted to simulate the spatial structure of the watershed. Then, 13 quantitative indices were, respectively, derived from two kinds of watershed spatial structures. With an advanced machine learning algorithm (LightGBM), experiment results showed that the proposed method showed good comprehensive performances. The overall accuracy achieved 91.67% and the Kappa coefficient achieved 0.90. By comparing with the landform recognition using terrain indices or texture derivatives, it showed better performance and robustness. It was noted that, in terms of loess ridge and loess hill, the proposed method can achieve higher accuracy, which may indicate that the proposed method is more effective than the previous methods in alleviating the confusion of the landforms whose morphologies are complex and similar. In addition, the LightGBM is more suitable for the proposed method, since the comprehensive manifestation of their combination is better than other machine learning methods by contrast. Overall, the proposed method is out of the previous landform recognition method and provided new insights for the field of landform recognition; experiments show the new method is an effective and valuable landform recognition method with great potential as well as being more suitable for watershed object-based landform recognition.