Benchmarking and quality analysis of DEM generated from high and very high resolution optical stereo satellite data

The Working Group 4 of Commission I on ¿Geometric and Radiometric Modelling of Optical Spaceborne Sensors¿ provides on its website several stereo data sets from high and very high resolution spaceborne sensors. Among these are data from the 2.5 meter class like ALOS-PRISM and Cartosat-1 as well as, in near future, data from the highest resolution sensors (0.5 m class) like GeoEye-1 and Worldview-1 and -2. The region selected is an area in Catalonia, Spain, including city areas (Barcelona), rural areas and forests in flat and medium undulated terrain as well as steeper mountains. In addition to these data sets, ground truth data: orthoimages from airborne campaigns and Digital Elevation Models (DEM) produced by laser scanning, all data generated by the Institut Cartogràfic de Catalunya (ICC), are provided as reference for comparison. The goal is to give interested scientists of the ISPRS community the opportunity to test their algorithms on DEM generation, to see how they match with the reference data and to compare their results within the scientific community. A second goal is to develop further methodology for a common DEM quality analysis with qualitative and quantitative measures. Several proposals exist already and the working group is going to publish them on their website. But still there is a need for more standardized methodologies to quantify the quality even in cases where no better reference is available. The data sets, the goal of the benchmarking and first evaluation results are presented within the paper. Algorithms using area-based least squares matching are compared to those using additionally feature-based matching or newly developed algorithms from the Computer Vision community. The main goal though is to motivate further researchers to join the benchmarking and to discuss pros and cons of the methods as well as to trigger the process of establishing standardized DEM quality figures and procedures.

REINARTZ Peter;  PABLO D'Angelo;  KRAUSS Thomas;  POLI Daniela;  JACOBSEN Karsten;  BUYUKSALIH Gurcan; 

2010-08-04

ITC

JRC57049

http://www.isprs.org/proceedings/XXXVIII/part1/09/09_03_Paper_33.pdf,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC57049,