TERRAIN EDITING SOFTWARE
A photogrammetric surface is rarely the surface you want to calculate on. Vegetation, site huts, parked machines and spoil left over from the last campaign all sit on top of the ground you are trying to measure. STREAM edits that terrain in place — flatten an area, lift or drop it, or lift an object off the ground — and keeps every edit in the project rather than writing over your DEM.
Terrain editing is correcting a digital elevation model so it represents the ground you actually want to work with. A drone-derived DSM records whatever the camera saw: canopy, roofs, vehicles, temporary piles. If you compute a volume or draw a contour against that surface, those objects go into the answer.
The usual fix is destructive — you regenerate the surface in the photogrammetry package, or you edit the raster and save over it. Both cost you the original. STREAM takes the other route: edits are stored as part of the project and applied when the terrain is drawn, sampled or exported, so the source file on disk is never modified and any edit can be switched off later.
Draw an area on the terrain and STREAM levels the ground inside it to a surface built from the boundary. The edge is sampled along its whole length, not just at the corners, so the patch meets the surrounding terrain continuously instead of standing on a wall.
Click a tree, a hut, a truck or a small pile. STREAM estimates the local ground beneath it, isolates the object from the terrain around it, and fills the hole with a smooth surface that follows the neighbouring slope. The area around the object is left untouched.
Draw an area instead of clicking, and STREAM finds the objects inside it and shows what it proposes to remove. Approve or cancel before anything is written to the terrain.
Apply a vertical offset to everything inside an area — useful when a block was flown against a different datum, or when a survey needs to be tied to a known level.
Edits live in the project file, not in the raster. Nothing is written over your GeoTIFF, edits can be hidden or deleted individually, and reopening the project restores them.
Contours, profiles, cross-sections, slope, aspect, viewshed, hydrology and the analysis exports all read the edited ground. An open elevation profile updates as you add or hide an edit.
Open the DEM, DSM or DTM you want to correct. STREAM reads GeoTIFF directly, at full resolution.
Use Remove Object to click individual trees, huts or vehicles, or draw an area to review and approve several at once.
Draw the area — a pad, a floor, a bench — and level it to a surface taken from its own boundary.
Apply a vertical offset inside an area when the block sits at the wrong height.
Draw an elevation profile across the edit, or regenerate contours, and confirm the corrected ground is what you expect.
Write the corrected surface out as a GeoTIFF when another package needs it, or leave the edits in the project and calculate on them directly.
No. Edits are stored in the STREAM project and applied when the terrain is drawn, sampled or exported. The GeoTIFF on disk is not modified. If you need the corrected surface as a file, you export it explicitly as a new GeoTIFF.
Yes. Each edit is a separate record in the project. You can hide it to see the ground underneath, or delete it, and the terrain returns to its original elevations.
STREAM estimates the local ground surface under the click by progressively filtering out anything that rises too steeply above it, separates the object from the terrain it is standing on, and then fills the resulting gap with a smooth surface constrained by the elevations around it. The fill follows the neighbouring slope rather than flattening it.
No. Object removal handles things that stand above the ground — vegetation, structures, vehicles, small piles. To raise a depression, draw the area and flatten it or apply a vertical offset instead.
Contours, elevation profiles, cross-sections, slope, aspect, viewshed and hydrology all read the edited ground, and the analysis exports bake the edits into the raster they write. Volume calculation and the measurement overlay currently sample the unedited surface.
No. If you need a full bare-earth classification of a large point cloud, do it in the photogrammetry or lidar package that produced the data. STREAM's editing is for the corrections you find while working on an engineering task: an object the filter missed, an area that has to be flat, a block at the wrong level.
Free beta for Windows x64. Works fully offline with GeoTIFF, LAS/LAZ and DXF.
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