Alternative Open-Source Stereo Pipelines

Comparisons of ASP with other widely used open-source stereo photogrammetry pipelines, using the SpaceNet UCSD WorldView-3 example as a common test case.

Note

This is not a comprehensive comparison of processing parameters between ASP, CARS, and SETSM. We make no quantitative ranking between DEM outputs.

In these sections, we seek to:

• document the processing setup for the pipelines,

• briefly discuss some key differences,

• and demonstrate reasonable, comparable results for the same stereo scenes from each tool.

We encourage end users to make their own comparisons, with these notes providing promotion and helpful guidance for the tools.

SETSM

Surface Extraction with TIN-based Search-space Minimization (Ohio State / PGC).

SETSM — SpaceNet UCSD WorldView-3

CARS

CNES open-source stereo pipeline with Pandora dense matching.

CARS — SpaceNet UCSD WorldView-3

Key Differences

ASP is general purpose software for geodesy and stereogrammetry. It contains tooling for alignment of point clouds, structure-from-motion, jitter solving, camera intrinsic refinement, and more beyond DEM generation from stereo-pairs.

Our comparison focuses only on the standard stereo pipeline for the three tools.

Feature	ASP	CARS	SETSM
Language	C++	Python + C++ (pybind11)	C++
Dense matching	NCC, MGM, SGM, etc.	Pandora (Census + SGM)	TIN-based NCC
Bundle adjustment	Separate tool (bundle_adjust)	Separate tool (cars-bundleadjustment)	None (RPC bias comp. only)
Install	Pre-built binaries	pip / Docker	Build from source