HIGH-PRECISION DEM PRODUCTION FOR SPACEBORNE STEREO SAR IMAGES BASED ON SIFT MATCHING AND REGION-BASED LEAST SQUARES MATCHING

Abstract. Generally, there are two ways to generate Digital Elevation Model (DEM) using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data, which are Interferometer Synthetic Aperture Radar(InSAR) and radargrammetry. Considering the disadvantages of InSAR data, such as the limit of terrain and the influence of water content, the application field of InSAR is relatively limited, while radargrammetry is more widely applied since it does not have such limits. However, for high-precision stereo SAR imagery, since the terrain distortion caused by shooting angle cannot be eliminated and the speckle noises are obvious, the classical matching algorithms for optical stereo images do not have the same effect on SAR data.

Based on the experience of optical stereo image matching, this paper proposes a new algorithm which combines the feature of SIFT image matching, region-based least squares matching and TIN . First, SIFT matching is used as the initial matching to obtain the sparse DEM, then by using TIN the matching points are forecast, finally the region-based least squares matching is adopted to get accurate matching points. In this paper, COSMO-SkyMed and TSX stereo images of Lanzhou area are used to validate the proposed method. Experiment results show that the algorithm can be effectively used in stereo SAR matching and high-precision DEM production.