Enhancement of interferometric SAR data using segmented intensity information in urban areas

In the InSAR process the height information of the scene is derived from the phase data, which suffers from noise especially in case of low coherence. As a consequence, irregular height jumps occur even inside flat objects. This paper refers to investigations which stabilize and improve the InSAR height data in scenes containing man-made objects, e.g. to generate models of urban areas. After speckle filtering, a segmentation of the intensity data is carried out. With these segments the height data are masked and an average height is calculated with the related intensity values as weights. The results are refined incorporating detected shadow areas. A test site including the airport of Frankfurt (Main) was chosen. For the visualization purpose, the smoothed height data is represented in a depth map. The results are compared to a vector map and a 3D-model of the scene