Cartosat-1 satellite, launched by Department of Space (DOS), Government of India, is dedicated to stereo viewing for large scale mapping and terrain modelling applications. This stereo capability fills the limited capacity of very high resolution satellites for three-dimensional point determination and enables the generation of detailed digital elevation models (DEMs) not having gaps in mountainous regions like for example the SRTM height model.The Cartosat-1 sensor offers a resolution of 2.5m GSD in panchromatic mode. One CCD-line sensor camera is looking with a nadir angle of 26' in forward direction, the other 5' aft along the track. The Institute "Area di Geodesia e Geomatica"-Sapienza Università di Roma and the Institute of Photogrammetry and Geoinformation, Leibniz University Hannover participated at the ISPRS-ISRO Cartosat-1 Scientific Assessment Programme (CSAP), in order to investigate the generation of Digital Surface Models (DSMs) from Cartosat-1 stereo scenes. The aim of this work concerns the orientation of Cartosat-1 stereo pairs, using the given RPCs improved by control points and the definition of an innovative model based on geometric reconstruction, that is used also for the RPC extraction utilizing a terrain independent approach. These models are implemented in the scientific software (SISAR-Software per Immagini Satellitari ad Alta Risoluzione) developed at Sapienza Università di Roma. In this paper the SISAR model is applied to different stereo pairs (Castelgandolfo and Rome) and to point out the effectiveness of the new model, SISAR results are compared with the corresponding ones obtained by the software OrthoEngine 10.0 (PCI Geomatica).By the University of Hannover a similar general satellite orientation program has been developed and the good results, achieved by bias corrected sensor oriented RPCs, for the test fields Mausanne (France) and Warsaw (Poland) have been described.For some images, digital height models have been generated by automatic image matching with least squares method, analysed in relation to given reference height models. For the comparison with the reference DEMs the horizontal fit of the height models to each other has been checked by adjustment
