Orthorectification using a high resolution DSM for fusion of data from different sensor systems

Abstract

The employment of different airborne and spaceborne systems opens the opportunity for an exploitation of complementary as well as supplementary sensor information for many purposes. One of the main future tasks in the field of reconnaissance and surveillance is the fusion of these heterogeneous data. The use of different sensors enables the exploitation and the extraction of information on a higher level, supporting a value adding to the reconnaissance chain, which is especially helpful to interpret built up areas in urban terrain. Because of the different imaging properties of the sensor systems, it is necessary to transform the datasets into a common coordinate system. For each imaging device a specific transformation equation system has to be applied depending on the sensor parameters and supplementary metadata. These specific imaging transformations (orthorectification) using a high resolution Digital Surface Model (DSM) are apllied to a multisensor data set. An orthorectification method especially for SAR images was developed and applied to airborne SAR data. Results are presented.