An effective filter for removal of production artifacts in U.S. Geological Survey 7.5-minute digital elevation models

Many digital elevation models (DEM) produced by the U.S. Geological Survey suffer from the presence of striping artifacts, which limit their utility. The most common approaches to filtering the affected DEMs rely on simple low-pass filters that blur fine details. A new filtering algorithm has been developed that isolates the stripes by applying a low-pass filter along the axis of the striping, followed by high-pass filtering orthogonal to the stripes. Once isolated, the artifacts are subtracted from the DEM to yield clean, detailed terrain data.