POTENTIAL OF DENSE MATCHING FOR THE GENERATION OF HIGH QUALITY DIGITAL ELEVATION MODELS

Abstract. Until recently, the acquisition of high quality Digital Elevation Models was dominated by the use of airborne LiDAR. However, the increasing quality of digital airborne cameras in combination with recent improvements in matching algorithms meanwhile allow for the automatic image based collection as a suitable alternative. Within the paper, these progresses will be demonstrated on the example of photogrammetric DEM generation using the Semi-Global Matching (SGM) stereo method. Since this approach aims at a pixel-wise matching, dense 3D point clouds can be generated. The tests described in the paper are based on data collected from different digital airborne cameras at various flight scenarios during a recent test on photogrammetric 3D data capture. By these means, the impact of different stereo configurations on the quality of the final outcome can be evaluated and compared to already available test results. Special interest is also paid to the analysis and combination of multiple stereo image pairs with different base- to-height ratios, which can be used efficiently to increase the accuracy and reliability of the matching result.