Extraction and three-dimensional reconstruction of isolated buildings in urban scenes from high-resolution optical and sar spaceborne images

In this paper, we propose a new complete semi-automatic processing chain able to provide, from a couple of high-resolution optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, a simple 3-D reconstruction of buildings in urban scenes. A sequence of processing, exploring the complementarities of both optical and SAR data, is developed for building reconstruction. The chain is decomposed into the main following steps: First, potential building footprints are extracted from the monoscopic optical image through global detection followed by a boundary refinement. Then, the optical footprints are projected and registered into SAR data to get a fine superposition between optical and SAR homologous ground features. Finally, the last step, based on the optimization of two SAR criteria, is performed to deal with building validation and height retrieval. Each of these steps is methodologically described and applied on scenes of interest on Quickbird and TerraSAR-X images. A qualification of each reconstructed building by a score of confidence is then proposed. Good results of building detection are obtained, and relevant height estimations are retrieved.