Benchmarking and quality analysis of DEM generated from high and very high resolution optical stereo satellite data

The Working Group 4 of Commission I on "Geometric and Radiometric Modelling of Optical Spaceborne Sensors" will provide on its website several stereo data sets from high and very high resolution spaceborne stereo sensors. Among these are data from the 2.5 meter class like ALOS-PRISM and Cartosat-1 as well as, in near future, data from the highest resolution sensors (0.5 m class) like GeoEye-1 and Worldview-1. The region selected is an area in Catalonia, Spain, including city areas (Terrassa), rural areas and forests in flat and medium undulated terrain as well as steep mountainous terrain. In addition to these data sets, ground truth data like orthoimages from airborne campaigns and Digital Elevation Models (DEM) produced by laser scanning, all data generated by the Institut Cartografic de Catalunya (ICC), are provided as reference for comparison. The goal is to give interested scientists of the ISPRS community the opportunity to test their algorithms on DEM generation, to see how they match with the reference data and to compare their results within the scientific community. A second goal is to develop further methodology for a common DEM quality analysis with qualitative and quantitative measures. Several proposals exist already and the working group is going to publish them on their website. But still there is a need for more standardized methodologies to quantify the quality even in cases where no better reference is available. The data sets, the goal of the benchmarking, the comparison strategy and first very preliminary evaluation results with some data of the selected areas are presented within the paper. The main goal though is to motivate further researchers to join the benchmarking and to discuss pros and cons of the methods as well as to trigger the process of establishing standardized DEM quality figures and procedures