Thales refines satellite DSMs with diffusion models, cutting urban RMSE from 6.00 to 3.45 m

thalesgroup · hf · 2026-09-28

Thales researchers present a modified Stable Diffusion 3 with a pruned text stream and patch-wise normalization to refine photogrammetric Digital Surface Models conditioned on both DSMs and Pléiades imagery. Trained against LiDAR ground truth, the approach cuts Dense Urban RMSE from 6.00 to 3.45 m in in-context French cities and from 4.16 to 2.77 m in held-out Bordeaux, offering a cheap path to accurate 3D elevation maps from satellite images.

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