Exploiting SAR visual semantics in Tomo SAR for 3D modeling of buildings

Recently a new paradigm is emerging in synthetic aperture radar(SAR) three-dimensional(3D) imaging technology where the imaging performance is enhanced by exploiting SAR visual semantics. Here by “SAR visual semantics”, we mean primarily the scene conceptual structural information extracted directly from SAR images. Under this paradigm, a paramount open problem lies in what and how the SAR visual semantics could be extracted and used at different levels associated with different structural information. This work is a tentative attempt to tackle the above what-and-how problem, and it mainly consists of the following two parts. The first part is a sketchy description of how three-level(low, middle, and high) SAR visual semantics could be extracted and used in SAR Tomography(TomoSAR), including an extension of SAR visual semantics analysis(e.g., facades and roofs) to sparse 3D points initially recovered via traditional TomoSAR methods. The second part is a case study on two open source TomoSAR datasets to illustrate and validate the effectiveness and efficiency of SAR visual semantics exploitation in TomoSAR for box-like 3D building modeling. Due to the space limit, only main steps of the involved methods are reported, and we hope, such neglects of technical details will not severely compromise the underlying key concepts and ideas.