Urban building height variance from multibaseline ERS coherence

Multibaseline European Remote Sensing (ERS) interferometric synthetic aperture radar coherence images from Cardiff, U.K. are investigated with respect to urban form. A model of spatial coherence, taking into account the vertical distribution of scatterers, is inverted to allow urban building height variance to be retrieved. Sixty-nine coherence maps are employed, generated from 20 ERS images. No a priori information is required in the analysis. However, realistic vertical scatterer distributions are retrieved, and Cardiff's central business district is automatically identified. This analysis demonstrates the utility of the urban decorrelation models employed.