An advanced technique for building detection in VHR SAR images

The new spaceborne very high resolution (VHR) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensors, such as TerraSAR-X and Cosmo-SkyMed permit to extract information from VHR SAR data in urban areas at the level of individual buildings. To support the widespread usage of VHR SAR for different application scenarios (e.g. damage assessment after natural disasters), and hence to increase the value of the data, automatic methods for building detection and reconstruction should be developed. In this paper we present a novel method for automatic building detection from single detected VHR SAR imagery. In a first step we extract basic features (e.g. lines) and identify their semantic meaning modeled as the degree of membership of the feature to a certain scattering class (e.g. double bounce). Then, we analyze the features extracted in a neighborhood system to identify building candidates using a production system. Finally, a score is calculated for each building candidate based on the semantic meaning of i...