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An Automated, Open Source Pipeline for Mass Production of 2 m/px DEMs from Commercial Stereo Imagery

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An Automated, Open Source Pipeline for Mass Production of 2 m/px DEMs from Commercial Stereo Imagery
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188
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CC Attribution 3.0 Germany:
You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
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Production Year2014
Production PlacePortland, Oregon, United States of America

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Abstract
We have adapted the NASA Ames Stereo Pipeline (ASP) - a suite of automated, open source, command-line photogrammetry tools originally developed for NASA planetary missions - to process high-resolution stereo satellite imagery of the Earth. These tools are multithreaded, memory efficient and scalable, which enables processing of "big image data" (e.g., 16-bit panchromatic WorldView images with dimensions ~36000 x 460000 px). We have deployed this pipeline on the NASA Pleiades supercomputer to generate ~2 m/px digital elevation models (DEMs) and ~0.5 m/px orthoimages for thousands of WorldView-1/2 along-track stereopairs. New ASP tools mitigate systematic DEM artifacts and allow for automated, a posteriori DEM coregistration using iterative closest point algorithms. When existing control data are available (e.g. LiDAR, GPS), automated alignment routines offer sub-meter horizontal and vertical DEM accuracy.Our research applications focus on ice sheet dynamics in Greenland/Antarctica and ice/snow evolution in the Pacific Northwest. We have developed an additional collection of tools for DEM analysis, including utilities to produce maps of 3D surface displacement (velocity) vectors and eulerian/lagrangian elevation change. We present the following case studies to highlight the capabilities of these data and our open source workflow:-A 57+ DEM timeseries from 2008-2013 for Greenland's most dynamic outlet glacier, revealing >40 m/yr interannual thinning and large seasonal variability-Annual DEM mosaics that reveal the ongoing evolution of West Antarctica's "weak underbelly", an area roughly the size of New Mexico-Repeat DEM timeseries for Mt. St. Helen's showing volcanic dome growth, glacier advance, canopy height, fluvial erosion/deposition, and landslides.For many applications, DEMs derived from high-resolution satellite imagery are comparable to those derived from airborne LiDAR data, with the advantage of global, on-demand tasking capabilities and reduced costs. Archived commercial stereo imagery is available at no cost to federal employees or federally-funded researchers, and the tools/methods highlighted here offer an automated, open source alternative to traditional, GUI-based, commercial photogrammetry software packages. https://github.com/NeoGeographyToolkit/StereoPipeline
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