Applicative potential of digital surface models derived from Pleiades-HR tri-stereoscopic acquisitions and TerraSAR-X/TanDEM-X interferometric pairs in a range of thematic domain

A wide range of new optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites has been launched in the recent years, with increased capacities for imaging the Earth´s topography. This is the case in particular with the optical Pleiades-HR constellation, having the capacity of acquiring up to several images along the satellite track for generating elevation data. Identically TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X satellites allow greater accuracy than previous SAR missions thanks to their close tandem flying formation inducing no temporal decorrelation between the interferometric image pairs. A quality assessment analysis is currently in progress for both techniques, intending to underline that these sensors offer very interesting results in comparison with existing data. Not only will a lot of applications benefit from this improved accuracy, but this will help developing new ones in a range of thematic domains.