Combining high-resolution optical and SAR data for rectangle building detection and height estimation in urban areas

A new complete scheme for urban rectangle building detection and height estimation was proposed using one high-resolution optical image and one synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image. The scheme exploited adequately the complementarities of both data and consisted of a sequential processing chain: building boundary extraction from both data, registration from optical image to SAR image based on an integrated criterion and building height estimation based on a "hypothesis generation-simulation-matching" procedure. Especially, the proposed method performed well also for partially occluded buildings. The method was tested and validated over two different scenes.