Automatic DSM generation from ALOS PRISM

Panchromatic Remote-sensing Instrument for Stereo Mapping, one of onboard sensors carried by Advanced Land Observing Satellite, was designed to generate worldwide topographic data with its stereoscopic, high resolution observation. The global digital surface models are expected to be generated by utilizing the archives of the stereo images observed during more than five years of the satellite mission. The operation to generate the digital surface model should be full-automatic so that we can process a huge amount of archived stereo images consisting of more than one million scenes on global land areas. One of the most challenging tasks in the full-automatic process is the masking/discarding of outlier areas covered with water, snow, cloud, etc. This paper briefly reports on the preliminary algorithms of the full-automatic process, including the masking/discarding of outlier areas, to generate the global digital surface models.