An Approach to Unsupervised Detection of Fully and Partially Destroyed Buildings in Multitemporal VHR SAR Images

Abstract

In the presence of abrupt change events, multitemporal synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data represent a precious supporting tool for quantifying changes, in particular in urban areas. A large amount of SAR data also exists at very high resolution (VHR). Over urban areas, the introduction of the VHR imagery moves the analysis down to the single building scale. However, VHR imagery is also characterized by a large heterogeneity and a more complex representation of the building. In this work, we propose a geometrical model for describing partially destroyed buildings and derive the corresponding multitemporal backscattering signature by applying the ray-tracing method. The model is integrated into an unsupervised automatic approach for the detection of both fully and partially destroyed buildings. The strategy considers a hierarchical structure of the changes. Experimental results conducted on two multitemporal VHR SAR datasets show a large robustness of the approach and good accuracy in the detection of the classes for damaged buildings with different severity levels.