Comparison of DSM Generation Methods on IKONOS Images

Abstract

In this article two methods for a almost fully automatic generation of digital surface models from Ikonos stereo data are described and limitations are analyzed. An important critical parameter for the derivation of DSM is the convergence angle of the stereo pair. Impacts of this value are shown and discussed. In the first method parallaxes are derived by a classical hierarchical intensity based matching not assuming (quasi) epipolar geometry. The second discussed approach is based on epipolar images provided by Space Imaging or calculated from the level 1 data. The parallaxes are extracted via a dynamic programming approach. The results are compared to a given laser DSM and the usability of the methods for three dimensional modelling of urban areas is discussed.