Elevation correction and building extraction from interferometric SAR imagery

The development of high (2m) resolution interferometric SAR (IFSAR) instrumentation makes extraction of man made and natural urban structures feasible. In particular, the authors consider building extraction from imagery of an urban/industrial area. IFSAR imagery are particularly well suited for this task because these data include the measured elevation as well as the coherence and intensity of the back scattered radiation. Gradients in the IFSAR elevation correspond directly to elevation edges. Coherence and intensity data can be combined to give specific information about the scattering properties of the viewed surface. The disadvantage of IFSAR imagery is that these data are typically of lower resolution and contain greater noise than other data such as optical photography, also the data contain specific artifacts that must be removed. Indeed, the motivation for building and tree extraction behind this work is the need to remove noise and artifacts from the IFSAR data. Techniques for removing artifacts that are peculiar to IFSAR data are particularly discussed.