Reconstruction of residential buildings by detail analysis of multi-aspect InSAR data

Abstract

State-of-the-art SAR sensors suggest utilizing InSAR-Data for the analysis of dense urban areas. The appearance of buildings in SAR or InSAR data is characterized by the effects of the inherent oblique scene illumination, such as layover, occlusion by radar shadow and multipath signal propagation. Therefore, especially in dense built-up areas reconstruction quality can be improved by a combined analysis of multi-aspect data. The presented approach focuses on reconstruction of buildings in residential districts supported by knowledge based analysis considering the mentioned SAR-specific effects. The algorithm of building extraction starts with the segmentation of primitives, such as lines and edges, followed by the assembly of building hypotheses based on typical building features like linearity and right-angularity. The subsequent post-processing of building hypotheses contains the analysis of InSAR phases to improve footprint or to detect roof-type of buildings. The results are presented by using optical data and a high resolution LIDAR surface model as ground truth data.