In this work, we introduce an end-to-end workflow for very high-resolution satellite-based mapping, building the basis for important 3D mapping products: (1) digital surface model, (2) digital terrain model, (3) normalized digital surface model and (4) ortho-rectified image mosaic. In particular, we describe all underlying principles for satellite-based 3D mapping and propose methods that extract these products from multi-view stereo satellite imagery. Our workflow is demonstrated for the Pléiades satellite constellation, however, the applied building blocks are more general and thus also applicable for different setups. Besides introducing the overall end-to-end workflow, we need also to tackle single building blocks: optimization of sensor models represented by rational polynomials, epipolar rectification, image matching, spatial point intersection, data fusion, digital terrain model derivation, ortho rectification and ortho mosaicing. For each of these steps, extensions to the state-of-the-art are proposed and discussed in detail. In addition, a novel approach for terrain model generation is introduced. The second aim of the study is a detailed assessment of the resulting output products. Thus, a variety of data sets showing different acquisition scenarios are gathered, allover comprising 24 Pléiades images. First, the accuracies of the 2D and 3D geo-location are analyzed. Second, surface and terrain models are evaluated, including a critical look on the underlying error metrics and discussing the differences of single stereo, tri-stereo and multi-view data sets. Overall, 3D accuracies in the range of 0.2 to 0.3 m in planimetry and 0.2 to 0.4 m in height are achieved w.r.t. ground control points. Retrieved surface models show normalized median absolute deviations around 0.9 m in comparison to reference LiDAR data. Multi-view stereo outperforms single stereo in terms of accuracy and completeness of the resulting surface models.then results in 3D coordinates (i.e., a 3D point cloud) that is resampled into an intermediate DSM. Second, those DSMs are fused and post-processed yielding the final DSM. Within this task, the characteristics of the underlying sensor system is exploited, like availability of image triplets in case of Pléiadesand including high-level processing techniques for the given input. The applicability of high-level processing options, like the semi-global matching (SGM) technique, is investigated, enhanced and resulting achievements are illustrated and validated. 3.In the third task, one DTM and one nDSM are generated solely based on the DSM produced in the previous task. The main steps are ground point filtering, detecting points in the given DSM which are located on bare earth, hole filling to interpolate non-ground information and post-processing mainly for outlier removal. In this way, we can (a) filter man-made structures and vegetation and (b) retrieve vegetation or building heights, finally yielding the DTM and nDSM models. While this is a well-established procedure for airborne light dete...