Validation of a feature fusion scheme for urban DSM retrieval from high resolution SAR interferogram

Three-dimensional reconstruction in urban areas is one of the major issues in remote sensing applications. SAR interferometry (InSAR) has a great potential to provide Digital Surface Models (DSM), but the context of urban areas and high resolution (HR) is difficult (geometrical distortions, surface heterogeneities, speckle, height discontinuities). Previous studies prove both the difficulty and the potential of the method. In this paper, we propose a new fusion method to compute DSM from HR InSAR. The merging approach enables to take into account several kinds of information extracted from the original data in order to retrieve jointly a classification and a DSM. The paper will be focused on the analysis of the results in order to understand the limits and potentials of InSAR over urban areas. Before discussing the results, the method will be briefly described.