Abstract: A new evaluation model for the accuracy of digital elevation model is built based on the reconstructed contours.By the model,the accuracy of digital elevation model can be evaluated by the proposed reconstructed error that is the ratio of the area error between the reconstructed contour and the original contour to the length of original contour.The proposed error is unique.Compared with the root mean square error,the proposed method to evaluate digital elevation model is more reasonable and more reliability.