A Processing Chain for Simple 3D Reconstruction of Buildings in Urban Scenes From High Resolution Optical and SAR Images

In this paper, we propose a complete semi-automatic processing chain able to provide, from a couple of high-resolution optical and SAR images, a simple three-dimensional reconstruction of the buildings in urban scenes. The chain is decomposed into four steps: building boundary extraction, footprint projection and registration, height estimation and building validation. Each of these steps is described from a methodological point of view and applied on a scene of interest on Quickbird and TerraSAR-X images. Good results of building detection and height retrieval are obtained and a satisfying final 3D reconstruction of buildings is provided.