Potential and limits of InSAR data for the reconstruction of buildings

The automatic reconstruction of buildings for the generation of citymodels is of great interest for different tasks. 3D information canbe directly obtained from both, laser (LIDAR) and radar (InSAR) measurements.The data acquisition by SAR is described, with emphasis on the specialproperties of the interferometric SAR principle. A segmentation approachfor building reconstruction is proposed. In the case of InSAR, specialeffects are taken into account, which are caused by the side-lookingillumination. The estimation of the signal noise is considered inthe segmentation process. Besides the elevation, the intensity informationis exploited to detect building areas. The results show that buildingreconstruction is possible from InSAR, but the achievable level ofdetail cannot be compared with LIDAR. Inherent geometric constraintswhich limit the reconstruction of buildings from SAR data of denseurban areas are discussed     «

The automatic reconstruction of buildings for the generation of citymodels is of great interest for different tasks. 3D information canbe directly obtained from both, laser (LIDAR) and radar (InSAR) measurements.The data acquisition by SAR is described, with emphasis on the specialproperties of the interferometric SAR principle. A segmentation approachfor building reconstruction is proposed. In the case of InSAR, specialeffects are taken into account, which are caused by the side-lookingillumina...     »