Development of a new true orthophoto module with an improved digital elevation model

Technological advances in the field of photogrammetry and remote sensing facilitate the data production process and accelerate the orthophoto production process with high-performance software. Conventional orthophotos produced are not accurate enough when compared with reference data. One of the most common errors encountered during accurate orthophoto production is the failure to properly generate the digital elevation model (DEM). In this study, in order to improve the accuracy of the true orthophoto produced with commercial software, the production of true2 orthophotos with an improved DEM (i-DEM), which contains only data representing building roofs and boundaries, is proposed and realized. The proposal was supported by the integration of a new orthophoto module into a commercial software ArcGIS platform using the Python programming language. Forty-four high resolution digital images of a selected region in Yenice District (Karabük) were used as a dataset for testing the approach. The produced result was compared with the true orthophoto results produced by commercial software and the reference point cloud. As a result of the study, it was found that the use of i-DEM significantly improves the accuracy level in orthophoto production.