Digital Elevation Model (DEM) generation represents a continuous area of research,
where there was a great demand for it in day to day applications. These applications
move from electromagnetic propagation for telecommunication to more demanding
simulations for acoustic, urban planning, virtual and augmented reality. Year after year
radiometric quality and geometric accuracy of new high resolution satellites keep on
improving so much where satellite imagery become a real potential solution for the
production of such digital elevation models. This paper evaluates the accuracy of High
Resolution Stereo-Optical Satellite Imagery (HRSI) for DEM production using rational
function model (RFM) in Leica Photogrammetry Suite (LPS) environment. A well
distributed set of ground points was determined and then surveyed using GPS
surveying. These points were then divided into two sets: one will act as control set;
while the other will be the check points set in order to evaluate the accuracy of the
extracted digital elevation model. These points allow for qualitative and quantitative
evaluation process. Several experiments have been performed to evaluate the resulted
DEM. The resulted RMSe values of the experiments using 3 control points showed a
horizontal absolute accuracy of 0.61m in East direction and 0.68m in north direction.
Meanwhile, the vertical absolute accuracy reaches 1.05m. However, the best accuracy
achieved using 10 control points to be 0.58min east direction and 0.67m in north
direction for the horizontal absolute accuracy and 0.81mfor the vertical absolute
accuracy.