Detection and extraction of buildings from interferometric SAR data

In this paper, we present a complete procedure for the extraction and characterization of building structures starting from the three-dimensional (3-D) terrain elevation data provided by interferometric SAR measurements. Each building is detected and isolated from the surroundings by means of a suitably modified machine vision approach, originally developed for range image segmentation. The procedure is based an a local approximation of the 3-D data by means of best-fitting planes. In this way, a building footprint, height and position, as well as its description with a simple 3-D model, are recovered by a self-consistent partitioning of the topographic surface reconstructed from interferometric radar data.