Until a few years ago DEMs were used only by specialized scientists for terrain analysis, product development and decision making and by the army for military operations planning. Recently the DEM are used in a variety of both commercial and public business and management fields within telecommunications, navigation, constructions, energy, disaster management, transportation, weather forecast, remote sensing, geology, land cover classification, civil engineering and many more. All these applications could be summarised in four major categories: Commercial applications, Industrial applications, Military applications and Environmental-Ecological applications. Thus, there is a huge pressure for very accurate elevation data covering the entire planet surface. Image stereopairs form satellite sensors seem to provide a quite accurate and cost affordable source of elevation data. One of the newest satellite sensors with stereo collection capability is Cartosat. It can acquire stereopairs along the track with a 2,5m spatial resolution covering areas of 30X30km. In this study we compare a DEM created from a Cartosat stereopair to DEM created from other elevation data sources: 1/50.000 topographic maps, SRTM data, airphotos stereo-pair. The area of study is situated in Chalkidiki Peninsula, Greece. After a first control for random or systematic errors a statistical analysis was done. Points of known elevation have been used to estimate the accuracy of these three DEMs. The elevation difference between the different DEMs was calculated. Elevation profiles and derived maps (slope and aspect) were created and compared. 2D RMSE, correlation and the percentile value were also computed and the results are presented.

Date Published: 9 October 2008
PDF: 12 pages
Proc. SPIE 7106, Sensors, Systems, and Next-Generation Satellites XII, 71061C (9 October 2008); doi: 10.1117/12.800019

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7106:
Sensors, Systems, and Next-Generation Satellites XII
Roland Meynart; Steven P. Neeck; Haruhisa Shimoda; Shahid Habib, Editor(s)