A TIE POINT MATCHING STRATEGY FOR VERY HIGH RESOLUTION SAR-OPTICAL STEREOGRAMMETY OVER URBAN AREAS

Abstract. This paper presents a matching strategy for sparsely distributed tie points, which can be used to carry out SAR-optical stereogrammetry. Since matching homologue points in heterogeneous multi-sensor image of complex terrain remains a challenging task, the proposed procedure combines the tie point matching step with the estimation of the corresponding 3D object coordinates. The results of this study are two-fold: On the one hand, they show that fully automatic SAR-optical stereogrammetry using very high resolution data of urban scenes is generally feasible and can provide 3D accuracies in the meter-domain. On the other hand, they highlight the difficulty of multi-sensor image matching, as well as the importance of robust matching strategies.