A Detailed Study about Digital Surface Model Generation Using High Resolution Satellite Stereo Imagery

Photogrammetry is currently in a process of renaissance, caused by the development of dense stereo matching algorithms to provide very dense Digital Surface Models (DSMs). Moreover, satellite sensors have improved to provide sub-meter or even better Ground Sampling Distances (GSD) in recent years. Therefore, the generation of DSM from spaceborne stereo imagery becomes a vivid research area. This paper presents a comprehensive study about the DSM generation of high resolution satellite data and proposes several methods to implement the approach. The bias-compensated Rational Polynomial Coefficients (RPCs) Bundle Block Adjustment is applied to image orientation and the rectification of stereo scenes is realized based on the Project-Trajectory-Based Epipolarity (PTE) Model. Very dense DSMs are generated from WorldView-2 satellite stereo imagery using the dense image matching module of the C/C++ library LibTsgm. We carry out various tests to evaluate the quality of generated DSMs regarding robustness and precision. The results have verified that the presented pipeline of DSM generation from high resolution satellite imagery is applicable, reliable and very promising.