PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF 3DPD, THE PHOTOGRAMMETRIC PIPELINE FOR THE CASSIS STEREO IMAGES

Abstract. A novel photogrammetric pipeline has been designed by INAF-Padova for the processing of the recent stereo images of CaSSIS and it will be a starting point for the future procedures that will be applied to Stereo Camera (STC) (Cremonese, 2009; Da Deppo, 2010) images for the BepiColombo mission to Mercury. The large number of stereo pairs being generated has made it necessary that several teams attempt to generate products. The presented procedures are the two strategies (proposed by INAF-PADOVA and by EPFLLausanne) available nowadays in an international attempt to generate 3D products from the CaSSIS images. The comparisons here presented will be the first of several such efforts and are important to make the planetary community aware of the accuracy of the 3D data available. Furthermore, the possibility to consider higher accuracy DTMs as the ones of HiRISE makes the quality assessment of stereo products of CaSSIS robust and important for the assessment of data to be provided to the scientific community. The performance evaluation of the INAF-Padova pipeline (3DPD software) is the main objectives of this work. Additionally, the comparison between the correlation phase of 3DPD and of ASP (Moratto, 2010) that is integrated in the EPFL pipeline has been considered.