Accuracy assessment of elevation data obtained from radarsat stereo images

Abstract

The quality of elevation data generated from a stereo-pair of Radarsat images is assessed. The orbital data provided with the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data are inadequate for radargrammetric analysis. This is primarily due to the large intervals (8 min) over which the state vectors are given. The residuals between the observed distances r and the calculated ones are very large. A nonlinear optimization technique is applied to refine the orbits for improving the residuals. Using these refined orbits, estimates of rms errors in the coordinates of points derived through the standard radargrammetric analysis are obtained.