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.