GeoEye Vs QuickBird: operational potentialities, limits and integration for fast map production

Very High Resolution Satellite (VHRS) images have already demonstrated their great potentialities both for the generation of satellite orthoimages and for map production and updating at the middle scale (1:10000 – 1:5000). Nevertheless a big research effort has still to be done in order to investigate how different data with similar features can be integrated to improve the final result and especially to overcome the objective difficulty, for a common customer, of getting stereopairs from a single sensor. In this work a Geo GeoEye image and an Orthoready QuickBird one covering about 120 Km2 in the region of Tera (Niger), are considered to determine how successfully they can be integrated to exploit the maximum of resident information required to describe as better as possible the test area. A comparative process was employed to determine the planimetric positional difference affecting the original acquired images, the orthoimages obtained through a Rational Function Model (RFM) approach based on the released RPC (Rational Polynomial Coefficients) and a “rigorous” multi-sensor bundle adjustment performing the simultaneous orientation of both the images in a single block.