Fast Surface Height Determination Using Multi-Angular WorldView-2 Ortho Ready Urban Scenes

We present a novel method that automatically and accurately determines surface elevation in multi-angular WorldView-2 Ortho Ready Product panchromatic images without the need for detailed satellite ephemeris information. The solution expands our work on building height determination using fast template matching on GPUs, which was selected as one of the winners of the 2011 IEEE-DigitalGlobe Data Fusion Contest. The presented method automatically determines parallax in the multi-angular images and derives local object height from it. First, the method is demonstrated on calculating building heights which are validated against building heights acquired from public sources. The roof displacement analysis derived from the first results are then applied to produce a surface elevation for the full scene.