Urban building height variance from multibaseline ERS coherence

Multibaseline European Remote Sensing (ERS) interferometric synthetic aperture radar coherence images from Cardiff, U.K. are investigated with respect to urban form. A model of spatial coherence, taking into account the vertical distribution of scatterers, is inverted to allow urban building height variance to be retrieved. Sixty-nine coherence maps are employed, generated from 20 ERS images. No a priori information is required in the analysis. However, realistic vertical scatterer distributions are retrieved, and Cardiff´s central business district is automatically identified. This analysis demonstrates the utility of the urban decorrelation models employed.