TOPOGRAPHIC MAPPING AND TERRAIN MODELING FROM MULTI-SENSOR SATELLITE IMAGERY

Digital satellite imagery provides substantial high quality data for mapping, inventorying, monitoring, and surveying. In the last decade, high-resolution satellite imagery from satellites such as IKONOS, SPOT5 and Quickbird has opened a new era of remote sensing and photogrammetry as their 1 m resolution imagery will display sufficient metric quality to support geopositioning with meter level accuracy and topographic mapping at scales of 1:10,000 and larger (Shi and Shaker, 2003). Recently, the use of high-resolution satellite imagery (HRSI) in digital mapping has been significantly increased and has become a reliable substitute for aerial photography in many applications. HRSI also offers the capability for rapid data acquisition in large areas. The objectives of the paper are to use images from different satellite sensors for topographic mapping and terrain modeling, study the potential accuracy of using empirical mathematical models for this process and evaluate the accuracy that results from the analysis of different datasets. The images are at different resolution and mono or stereo images