Structure Filling and Matching for Three-Dimensional Reconstruction of Buildings From Single High-Resolution SAR Image

In this letter, a structure filling and matching method is proposed for the 3-D reconstruction of buildings, particularly those with combinational structures, from a single high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image. This method consists of two stages. First, the structure model of the investigated building is constructed by filling the building structure elements, i.e., walls and roofs, into an initialized empty scene. Subsequently, a series of simulated SAR images is generated by this structure model and matched with the real SAR image of the building. By finding the maximal mutual information between the simulated and real images, the optimal geometric parameters of the model are obtained, which make the output more accurate. Compared with other methods, this method can reconstruct different kinds of practical buildings and retrieve their exact geometric parameters, using only a single SAR image. The performance of this method is evaluated on real TerraSAR-X images to show its effectiveness.