DSMS GENERATION FROM COSMO-SKYMED, RADARSAT-2 AND TERRASAR-X IMAGERY ON BEAUPORT (CANADA) TEST SITE: EVALUATION AND COMPARISON OF DIFFERENT RADARGRAMMETRIC APPROACHES

Abstract. This work is focused on the analysis of potentialities of the radargrammetric DSMs generation using high resolution SAR imagery acquired by three different platforms (COSMO-SkyMed, TerraSAR-X and Radarsat-2) with particular attention to geometric orientation models.

Two orientation models have been tested in this work: the rigorous Toutin’s model, developed at the Canada Center for Remote Sensing (CCRS) and implemented in the commercial software package PCI Geomatica, and the radargrammetric model developed at University of Rome La Sapienza and implemented in the scientific software SISAR. A full comparison and analysis has been carried out over Beauport test site (Quebec, Canada), where a LIDAR ground truth and a dense set of GNSS CPs (Check points) are available. Moreover, a preliminary comparison between the DSMs extracted, respectively with SISAR and PCI-Geomatica has been performed. The accuracy of the generated DSMs has been evaluated through the scientific software DEMANAL developed by Prof. K. Jacobsen of University of Hannover.

As regards orientation models, the results shown that the Toutin’s model accuracy is slightly better than the SISAR one, even if it is important to underline that the SISAR model is computed without using a priori ground truth information.

As concern DSMs assessment, the global DSMs accuracy in term of RMSE is around 4 meter and the two radargrammetric approaches show similar performances.