Urban Area Building Reconstruction Using High Resolution SAR Image

The monitoring of urban area, target detection and building reconstruction have been actively studied and investigated since high resolution X-band SAR images could be acquired by airborne and/ or satellite SAR systems. This paper describes an efficient approach to reconstruct artificial structures (e. g. apartment, building and house) in urban area using high resolution X-band SAR images. Building footprint was first extracted from 1: 25,000 digital topographic map and then a corner line of building was detected by an automatic detecting algorithm. With SAR amplitude images, an initial building height was calculated by the length of layover estimated using KS-test (Kolmogorov-Smirnov test) from the corner line. The interferometric SAR phases were simulated depending on SAR geometry and changable building heights ranging from -10m to + 10 m of the initial building height. With an interferogram from real SAR data set, the simulation results were compared using the method of the phase consistency. One of results can be finally defined as the reconstructed building height. The developed algorithm was applied to repeatpass TerraSAR-X spotlight mode data set over an apartment complex in Daejeon city, Korea. The final building heights were validated against reference heights extracted from LiDAR DSM, with an RMSE (Root Mean Square Error) of about 1 similar to 2m.