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gradient calculation

Posted: Sat Mar 13, 2021 12:01 pm
by sscheidt77
I imported a raster of elevations into CC. I exported the z-coordinate to a scalar field, and then calculated gradient at Edit > Scalar Fields > Gradient. All units are in meters, both the cloud and scalar fields. Using the same raster of elevations, I calculated slope as a percentage in different applications (ENVI/IDL and ArcGIS). I get a different result.

I multiplied the gradients from CloudCompare by 100, and I compared their statistics and distributions. I'm attached histograms and statistics of the results. The white histogram on the left is from values calculated by CloudCompare. The red histogram on the right is from other applications.

Why is the gradient in CC approximately one half the value of percent slope calculated in other applications?

Gradient is obviously calculated differently, but only slightly, than slope in other software.