Detection and reconstruction of buildings from multiple view interferometric SAR data

Geometric reconstruction of human scale features gets feasible from airborne single pass IFSAR sensors. IFSAR data is corrupted by blur, speckle noise, and other view dependent effects as e.g., layover and shadows. Especially in case of buildings, those phenomenological features may also provide valuable information about the underlying structure. Combining multiple views and multiple data types of the same scene the exploitation of this information gets feasible. The authors use information from the interferometric height and coherence data to separate regions containing buildings from other objects in the scene. Shadow information from magnitude images is then used to delimit the exact boundaries of the buildings further. Rectangles are fit to the selected points and compared to ground truth measurements manually derived from optical images.