Assessment of freely available CartoDEM V1 and V1.1R1 with respect to high resolution aerial photogrammetric DEM in high mountains

The accuracy of DEMs shows wide variations from one terrain to another and it needs to be determined. This study evaluates NRSC (National Remote Sensing Centre, Hyderabad, India) CartoDEM V1 and V1.1R1 with respect to resampled ADS80 DEM for parts of the Himalayas. Both the test DEMs were properly registered with reference to resampled ADS80 DEM and then individually subtracted to get the difference DEMs. Visual and statistical analyses were performed to assess the quality of the tested DEMs in terms of visible terrain and vertical accuracy. For calculating the accuracies in different terrain classes, slope and aspect maps were generated from the ADS80 DEM. Properly registered Landsat5 TM data were used for the development of the land cover map with four classes. The overall vertical accuracy measured for CartoDEM V1 was 269.9m (LE90), while CartoDEM V1.1R1 showed huge improvement in the accuracy with 68.5m (LE90).