Reconstruction of man-made objects from high resolution SAR images

In this paper we present our concept to reconstruct the structure of building ensembles from high resolution interferometric and slant range SAR data. To fully automate the building reconstruction procedure we want to use a phenomenological approach, using layover and shadow boundaries together with edge information and intelligent combinations of measurements from all IFSAR data sources available. For a better understanding of the geometry and phenomenology of the SAR imaging process of buildings we coated a work environment with a simulator to produce magnitude slant range SAR images. As a first attempt to this phenomenology based approach we demonstrate the reconstruction of a single building. Starting from simulated test data we developed automated reconstruction algorithms from slant range shadow boundaries. These algorithms were then applied to original SAR data from the MOUT testsite. Compared to interferometric height measurements the results of our approach were quite promising