Structure extraction from high resolution SAR data on urban areas

This article handles with the problem of man-made structure extraction in high resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data. The ability of new sensors to provide fine resolution imagery of the Earth surface leads to new remote sensing applications. As a matter of fact, the extraction and recognition of smaller and smaller structures in crowded environment is now possible: in dense urban areas the detection of structures from building to car is expected. In this article, a chain of structure extraction in urban areas is proposed: the problem is split into different levels, detecting at each level smaller and smaller structures. In this framework, road extraction is considered and two algorithms based on dynamic programming and Hough transform are proposed and merged.