Automatic Recognition of Isolated Buildings on Single-Aspect SAR Image Using Range Detector

Man-made building objects mostly with vertical wall structures may present distinct scattering patterns, e.g., wall/roof upfront scattering, wall-ground double scattering, etc., along the range dimension in high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. In this letter, a 1-D detector, referred to as the “range detector,” is presented for building detection, which operates only along the range direction. Experiments show that this range detector can effectively detect and extract the footprint of the illuminated wall of a cuboid building, with which the outline of the building image can be captured by marching the footprint toward radar. This approach is applied to an airborne Pi-SAR image of Sendai, Japan, and more than 80% of the buildings can be identified. The building height and length are also estimated, and the errors are found around 4-5 m based on optical image.