Building detection and radar footprint reconstruction from single VHR SAR images

The development of methods for the automatic detection and reconstruction of building radar footprints fromsingle very high resolution (VHR) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is a difficult task for two main reasons: i) the very high complexity of VHR SAR images; and ii) the need to develop efficient algorithms that can be applied to large images in order to be used in real applications. In this paper we present a novel method for automatic building detection, which also reconstructs the 2D radar footprint of the detected buildings. The method is based on the extraction of a set of low-level features from the images and on their combination in more structured primitives. Then the semantic meaning of primitives is used for the definition of building candidates and for the radar footprint reconstruction. In order to process large VHR SAR images, the method has been implemented on a computer cluster. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the method using a large TerraSAR-X spotlight scene.