Evaluation of Digital Elevation Models Derived from Multi-Date Satellite Stereo Imagery for Urban Areas

Abstract

High-resolution digital elevation models of urban areas can support humanitarian organisations in their work; especially the 3D reconstruction of buildings is desirable because it can be used for population estimation and damage analysis after crises and disaster events. In this paper, we test the quality of multi-date DEMs with 15 Pléiades images from Port-au-Prince, Haiti using the automatic stereo pipeline s2p. We focus on triplet combinations with images taken from different dates. This study investigates the metaparameters satellite azimuth and incident angle to understand which recording geometry yields a good result in terms of completeness and accuracy. It is assumed that the closer the multi-date constellation gets to an in-orbit triplet, the better the quality of the DEM.