3d City Modeling from High-resolution Satellite Images

High-resolution satellite images having a footprint smaller than 5 m are becoming increasingly available. A large number of the high resolution satellite sensors acquire imagery in a pushbroom mode with CCD linear array technology. The need for accurate 3D object reconstruction requires a sophisticated camera model, being able to deal with such sensor geometry. The software package SAT-PP (Satellite Image Precision Processing), a full suite for the precision processing of linear array satellite sensors, has been recently developed at the Institute of Geodesy and Photogrammetry, ETH Zurich. The software can accommodate images from IKONOS, QuickBird, SPOT-5 HRS/HRG and will include sensors of similar type in the future. High-resolution satellite images capture very detailed information of the terrain. In particular, images such as IKONOS and Quickbird are at the resolution close to that of small-scale aerial photographs. Important applications could be the updating of urban/suburban databases, such as road network, building reconstruction, 3D city modeling and other GIS related applications. For these purposes, the SAT-PP software includes a module which can be used for feature collection. The functions include monoplotting with existing or automatically derived DTMs / DSMs, monoscopic measurement from stereo pairs or multiple images in semi-automatic mode and stereoscopic collection of objects in manual mode. Moreover, in combination with the software package CyberCity Modeler, 3D city models can be generated. The potential of SAT-PP and CyberCity Modeler to extract DSMs and buildings, and to produce 3D city models has been tested with IKONOS and Quickbird stereo images. In this paper the software packages are briefly described and the results achieved are reported and discussed.