Paper Info
Title
Extraction of Building Heights from VHR SAR Imagery using an Iterative Simulation and Match Procedure
Abstract
1. ABSTRACT The new space borne very high resolution (VHR) SAR sensors onboard the TerraSAR-X and COSMO-SkyMED satellites have a spatial resolution of 1 meter. In VHR SAR data, features from individual urban structures, like buildings, can be identified in their characteristic settings in urban settlement patterns (e.g. different residential areas, inner city centers, industrial parks). JRC's Information Support For Effective And Rapid External Aid (ISFEREA) action is developing its expertise in urban settlement characterization as part of its activities in support of crisis management, damage assessment, territorial management in third world countries and assessment of urbanization in African Megacities. The use of VHR SAR is expected to become an important complimentary methodology to urban characterization based on high and very high resolution optical imagery. The scattering phenomena of buildings in VHR SAR are mainly affected by the inherent side looking configuration of the SAR sensor (1), (2). Buildings which have the front wall parallel to the azimuth direction are characterized by a rectangular layover area, double bounce contributions, scattering from the roof and a shadow region. For buildings with aspect angles that are not parallel to the azimuth direction the backscattering characteristics changes primarily due to the absence of the strong double bounce effect and the angular effect on the shadow area (3). In this paper we present a 3D building reconstruction methodology based on the hybrid usage of VHR optical and SAR imagery, which is generic with respect to the type and shape of the man made structure under investigation. From the optical imagery the footprint of the building and the roof type is extracted. The height of the building is determined from the SAR imagery using a SAR simulator in an iterative procedure. The SAR simulator, which has been optimized in terms of memory efficiency and computational costs, is based on ray tracing taking into account backscattering from single and multiple scattering effects. Using the building footprint and roof characteristics for the model initialization, an iterative simulation procedure of buildings with different heights results in a local backscattering image which is then correlated to the local scene. The iteration stops when a match criterion has been satisfied. The main advantage of the application of a simulator in combination with the calculation of a match criterion is the simultaneous consideration of all characteristics of a building in SAR for the estimation of the height value. The efficiency of this approach is demonstrated for a test site in Dorsten, Germany, using VHR airborne optical and SAR data. The results are validated with Digital Surface Models (DSMs) and ancillary ground truth data sets such as building height measurements and 3D building models which were acquired during several measurement campaigns using Laser and LIDAR devices. Furthermore, to demonstrate the generic aspect of the approach, the procedure is demonstrated for the reconstruction of the pyramids of Gizeh in Egypt using recently acquired VHR TerraSAR-X data (4).
Year
DOI
Venue
2008
10.1109/IGARSS.2008.4779677
Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, 2008. IGARSS 2008. IEEE International
Keywords
Field
DocType
feature extraction,geophysical techniques,interferometry,polarimetry,remote sensing,spaceborne radar,synthetic aperture radar,3D reconstruction method,COSMO-SkyMED satellite,Egypt,Giza pyramid,Kirchhoff approximation,TerraSAR-X satellite,VHR-SAR image,airborne sensor,building height extraction,gable roof building,generic man made structure estimation,image detection,image extraction,interferometric data,match procedure,matching function,polarimetric data,spaceborne sensor,synthetic aperture radar,urban settlement pattern,urban structure,very-high resolution image,3D reconstruction,VHR SAR,building detection,height extraction
Iterative reconstruction,Computer vision,Polarimetry,Image sensor,Computer science,Synthetic aperture radar,Remote sensing,Spot beam,Feature extraction,Artificial intelligence,Pyramid,Image resolution
Conference
Volume
ISBN
Citations 
4
978-1-4244-2808-3
7
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.75
5
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Dominik Brunner117913.67
Guido Lemoine222736.45
Lorenzo Bruzzone34952387.72