More surface detail with One-Two-Pixel Matching

Photogrammetrically derived Digital Surface Models have been widely adopted in geoscientific applications such as mapping and change detection across volcanic surfaces, glaciers, areas of seismic activity, forests, river landforms etc. Resolution of the reconstructed surface is crucial as more accurate information enables more profound understanding of the phenomena. With this objective in mind, the research presented here proposes a new matching cost function that produces surfaces of enhanced resolution with respect to the gold standard: the window-based semi-global matching technique. We evaluate the algorithm on different image datasets spanning various acquisition geometries, radiometric qualities and ground sample distance sizes. In particular , results on Earth satellites (SPOT-7, Pleiades), extraterres-trial (Chang'E3 moon landing), aerial and terrestrial acquisitions are shown. The implementation of the method is available in MicMac-the free open-source software for photogrammetry.