Digital surface model generation from high-resolution satellite stereo imagery based on structural similarity

Abstract

In this study, we proposed an automatic approach to extract DSMs from VHR satellite imagery. This study aims to apply the histogram of orientated phase congruency (HOPC) descriptor and SIFT-Flow algorithm to match multi-view VHR satellite images densely and extract detailed DSMs competitive with ones generated from Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) point clouds. The HOPC descriptor relies on detecting features by calculating the phase congruency model, which allows the image features to be highly robust against illumination changes. Moreover, we developed an automatic algorithm to extract precise and homogenously distributed tie-points and subsequently conduct bias correction of the Rational Polynomial Coefficients (RPC). We tested our proposed algorithm on four WorldViw-3 datasets captured from different viewpoints, and compared the results with the DSMs obtained by the Semi-Global Matching (SGM) algorithm. The experimental results indicated the proficiency of our proposed method in generating accurate and reliable DSMs using VHR satellite data.