Accuracy assessment of digital elevation model generated from pleiades tri stereo-pair

Digital Elevation Model (DEM) is crucial for several purposes like town planning, hydrological analysis, land sliding, flash floods, earthquake, road construction, surface analysis, ortho-rectification of satellite imagery, 3D visualization, precise farming and forestry, base mapping, flight simulation and disaster management. Pleiades is a French constellation of very high resolution satellites. It acquires both panchromatic as well as multispectral imagery in Visible Near Infra-red (VNIR) range. The added benefit of Pleiades is that it provides tri stereo-pair imagery at 0.5m spatial resolution, unlike its other contemporary systems like Quickbird and IKONOS. Tri stereo-pair is used for Digital Terrain Model (DTM) and Digital Surface Model (DSM) extraction because of its backward and forward look angles. Moreover, Pleiades provides Rational Polynomial Coefficient (RPC) and sensor model data which augment the accuracy of its 3D products. Being a newly launched system, it provides fertile field for researchers to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of this system. This study explores the potential of Pleiades Tri stereo-pair in generating high resolution DEM, and comparing its accuracy with Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) and Advanced Space Thermal Emission Radiometer (ASTER). In this study, data from space borne LiDAR (ICESat/GLAS) was used as a reference due to its reported unprecedented accuracy. Comparison of Pleiades with LiDAR resulted in an R2 of 0.92 with an RMSE of 5.2m. Similarly, comparison of SRTM and ASTER resulted in an R2 of 0.74 (RMSE 7.5m) and R2 0.84 (RMSE 6.6m), respectively.