Surface Mapping using Image Triplets - Case Studies and Benefit Assessment in Comparison to Stereo Image Processing

Mapping of the Earth’s surface from satellite images is a continuing
 application in remote sensing, which has been distinctly pushed with
 the increasing availability of very high-resolution image data. In
 most of the missions, stereo images can be acquired making 3D mapping
 from space very attractive, as high accuracy and level of detail
 become feasible from such data. In this paper, several case studies
 are presented, which have been applied to stereo pairs acquired by
 the SPOT sensors as well as the very highresolution Ikonos sensor.
 As an extension to standard stereo mapping, a 3D mapping approach
 which makes use of multiple image coverage is presented. For this
 work, image triplets including multi-sensor data sets have been used
 to extract 3D topography information and to generate digital surface
 models. The benefit of this extended approach is comparatively assessed
 with respect to results achieved from standard stereo mapping.