SPOT and Landsat stereo fusion for data extraction over mountainous areas

In thematic and cartographic applications, planirnetric features are extracted from multi-sensor images such as SPOT and Landsat in order to take advantage of their complimentarity features. When no precise elevation data are available to ortho-rectify these images, e.g., in mountainous areas, stereo digital photogrammetric workstations (stereo DPWS) are now available for the interactive stereo fusion and plotting of multi-sensor stereo pairs. This paper presents a method and the quantitative results on the extraction of planimetric and altimetric features from a stereo pair generated with mixed sensor images (SPOT-P and Landsat TM) using the stereo DPWS, the DVP available at the Canada Centre for Remote Sensing. Results from this mixed sensor stereo pair, which has a base-to-height ratio of 0.49 and was taken over a mountainous area of the Rocky Mountains (Canada), show a planimetric accuracy of 11 to 12 m for well identified cartographic features, and an altimetric accuracy of 37 m for the extracted elevation data.