Fusion of Multiple View Interferometric and Slant Plane SAR Data for Building Reconstruction

Modern very high resolution interferometric SAR sensors deliver slant range magnitude and ground range interferometric height and coherence measurements at pixel sizes of 30cm to 10cm from a single flight path. Detection and reconstruction of buildings get feasible from this kind of data. Single data sources are corrupted by blur, speckle noise and other view dependent effects as e.g., layover and shadows. Especially in case of buildings, these phenomenological features provide also valuable information about the underlying building structure. In this paper we use information from the interferometric height and coherency channel to detect buildings. Shadow information from slant range magnitude images is then used to delimit the exact boundaries of the buildings further and rectangles are fit to the selected points. The resulting building models are input into a simulator to produce slant range magnitude images and interferometric height information. The layover and shadow regions from these simulated images are compared with the corresponding regions in the original data to detect occlusions of adjacent buildings and to further refine the building structure. The results are compared to ground truth data available from optical imagery. Accuracies achieved in the measurement of building dimensions are in the range of 3 pixels.