An improved approach for DSM generation from high-resolution satellite imagery

Abstract

This paper develops an improved approach to digital surface model (DSM) generation from high-resolution satellite imagery (HRSI). The approach centres upon an image matching strategy that integrates feature point, grid point and edge matching algorithms within a coarse-to-fine hierarchical process. The starting point is a knowledge of precise sensor orientation, achieved in this case through bias-compensated rational polynomial coefficients (RPCs), and the DSM is sequentially constructed through a combination of the matching results for feature and grid points, and edges at different image pyramid levels. The approach is designed to produce precise, reliable and very dense DSMs which preserv..