State of the Art in Digital Surface Modelling from Multi-View High-Resolution Satellite Images

Abstract

Data from the optical satellite imaging sensors running 24/7, is collecting in embarrassing abundance nowadays. Besides more suitable for large-scale mapping, multi-view high-resolution satellite images (HRSI) are cheaper when comparing to Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) data and aerial remotely sensed images, which are more accessible sources for digital surface modelling and updating. Digital Surface Model (DSM) generation is one of the most critical steps for mapping, 3D modelling, and semantic interpretation. Computing DSM from this dataset is relatively new, and several solutions exist in the market, both commercial and open-source solutions, the performances of these solutions have not yet been comprehensively analyzed. Although some works and challenges have focused on the DSM generation pipeline and the geometric accuracy of the generated DSM, the evaluations, however, do not consider the latest solutions as the fast development in this domain. In this work, we discussed the pipeline of the considered both commercial and opensource solutions, assessed the accuracy of the multi-view satellite image-based DSMs generation methods with LiDAR-derived DSM as the ground truth. Three solutions, including Satellite Stereo Pipeline (S2P), PCI Geomatica, and Agisoft Metashape, are evaluated on a WorldView-3 multi-view satellite dataset both quantitatively and qualitatively with the LiDAR ground truth. Our comparison and findings are presented in the experimental section.