Radargrammetric Extraction of Building Features from High Resolution Multi-aspect SAR Data

Abstract

State-of-the-art airborne SAR sensors provide spatial resolution on the order of one decimeter. In such data, many features of urban objects are observable, which were beyond the scope of radar remote sensing before. In this paper, the impact of high-resolution SAR data on the analysis of urban scenes is discussed. The new quality of the appearance of buildings in high-resolution data is discussed with a couple of amplitude SAR images taken from orthogonal viewing directions. The fine level of detail opens the opportunity to reconstruct the structure of man-made objects (e.g. buildings). A concept for the radargrammetric building analysis from high-resolution amplitude SAR imagery is proposed and results are presented. Keywords-SAR; reconstructuion; distortion; fusion; urban