Advanced DTM generation from very high resolution satellite stereo images

This work proposes a simple filtering approach that can be applied to digital surface models in order to extract digital terrain models. The method focusses on robustness and computational efficiency and is in particular tailored to filter DSMs that are extracted from satellite stereo images. It represents an evolution of an existing DTM generation method and includes distinct advancement through the integration of multi-directional processing as well as slope dependent filtering, thus denoted “MSD filtering”. The DTM generation workflow is fully automatic and requires no user interaction. Exemplary results are presented for a DSM generated from a Pléiades tri-stereo image data set. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations with respect to highly accurate reference LiDAR data confirm the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.