Digital elevation modelling of individual monuments from aerial photographs

Abstract

Digital elevation models (DEM) are crucial data products for a variety of geographic applications, and their generation directly from digitized stereopairs of vertical aerial photographs has recently been accomplished. Despite the growing number of software packages providing softcopy topographic photogrammetry, there is still a need for practical approaches that do not require accurate lens calibration information or time-consuming ground control.

This paper presents an algorithm for generating small-area DEMs directly from digitized aerial photographs, with no additional information required other than the flying height of the aircraft and a small number of control points measured from maps.