Lattice detection in persistent scatterer point clouds and oblique aerial imagery

Modern spaceborne SAR sensors like TerraSAR-X offer ground resolution of up to one meter in range and azimuth direction. Buildings, roads, bridges, and other man-made structures appear in such data often as regular patterns of strong and temporally stable points (Persistent Scatterer, PS). As one step in the process of unveiling what object structure actually causes the PS (i.e., physical nature) we present a two-dimensional production system which aggregates PS to lattices corresponding to the vertical and horizontal alignment of windows at multilevel building facades. Due to the similar oblique sensing geometry, facades are also visible in oblique aerial images with much higher resolution. Ideally advantages of both sensors can be combined (e.g., weather independence for SAR and high-resolution for optical images). The fusion of both sensors needs a high level of abstraction due to the different type of data. A common representation for facades are lattices which we extract in optical as well as in SAR data. The comparison show strong similarity and serve as a first step towards unveiling the physical nature of PS via lattice matching of data coming from different sensors. The biggest remaining obstacle is the transformation of the sensor´s imaging geometry into a common coordinate system.