Since the number of urban residents is rapidly increasing, especiallyin developing countries, relatively cheap and fast methods for modeling and mapping such cities are required. Besides the creationand updating of maps from sprawling cities three dimensional models are useful for simulation, monitoring and planning in caseof catastrophic events like flooding, tsunamis or earthquakes. Withthe availability of very high resolution (VHR) stereo satellite datainvestigations of large urban areas regarding their threedimensionalshape can be performed fast and relatively cheap in comparison toaerial photography – especially for cities in developing countries. Most of the methods actually used for the generationof city models depend on a large amount of interactive work and mostly also on additional information like building footprintsand so on. A method for a fully automatic derivation ofrelatively coarse and simple models of urban structure is thereforeof great use. In this paper one approach for such an automatic modeling and a processing chain is sketched and the method used forthe modeling of buildings is described. the members of the Photogrammetric/CartographicWorkingGroup are concerned with further refinements in order toachieve highest quality data products. These activities comprise improvementsof the exterior orientation of the camera,various approaches to enhance DTM quality, and the generation of mapsin the standard scale of 1:200 000 and largerscales as well. The paper reports on these activities and theresults achieved so far.     «

Since the number of urban residents is rapidly increasing, especiallyin developing countries, relatively cheap and fast methods for modeling and mapping such cities are required. Besides the creationand updating of maps from sprawling cities three dimensional models are useful for simulation, monitoring and planning in caseof catastrophic events like flooding, tsunamis or earthquakes. Withthe availability of very high resolution (VHR) stereo satellite datainvestigations of large urban areas rega...     »