A Technique for Improving the Quality of Stereo DEM Using Texture Filters

One of the most important procedure in stereo DEM generation is the stereo matching process which finds the conjugate pixels in a pair of stereo imagery. In order to be found as conjugate pixels, the pixels should have distinct spatial feature to be distinguished from other pixels. However, in the homogeneous areas such as water covered or forest canopied areas, it is very difficult to find the conjugate pixels due to the lack of distinct spatial feature. Most of erroneous elevation values in the stereo DEM are produced in those homogeneous areas. This paper presents a simple method for improving the quality of stereo DEM utilizing the texture filters. An entropy filter was applied to one of the input stereo imagery to extract very homogeneous areas before stereo matching process. Those extracted homogeneous areas were excluded from being candidates for stereo matching process. Also a statistical texture filter was applied to the generated elevation values before the interpolation process was applied in odor to remove the remaining anomalous elevation values. Stereo pair of SPOT level 1B panchromatic imagery were used for the experiments. The results showed that by utilizing the texture filters as a pre and a post processor of stereo matching process, the quality of the stereo DEM could be dramatically improved.