An Initial Study on Automatic Reconstruction of Ground DEMs from Airborne IfSAR DSMs

Abstract

The demands for ground digital elevation models (DEMs) have been increasing rapidly. Many modern mapping technologies, such as lidar scanning, interferometric SAR (IfSAR), and stereo image matching, are capable of generating digital surface models (DSMs) directly. Research on deriving DEM sf romDSM si s a topical area. Airborne IfSAR technology has been in commercial operation since 1996. However, it is still technically challenging to automate the process of generating DEM sf romIfSAR DSMs. The lack of scientific studies in this area is mainly caused by the sensitivity and availability of commercial IfSAR data. In this study, researchers have been working with the commercial IfSAR system developer to perform an initial study on automatic reconstruction of ground DEM sf romIfSAR DSMs. This paper presents a compact and yet efficient version of our developed approach. This approach has been tested by using many IfSAR DSM si ndifferent hilly urban areas with light and moderate variations in relief. An accuracy analysis of the reconstructed ground DEMs against the laser DSMs and DEMs has also been performed to test the reliability and efficiency of our approach.