Extraction of building parameters by SAR radargrammetric analysis of layover areas

The advantages of SAR sensors for remote sensing applications have been proven many times already. Especially due to the high resolutions that the new generation of SAR sensors (e.g. TerraSAR-X, COSMO-Skymed) can achieve, those are becoming very interesting for the analysis of urban areas. Up to now, mainly interferometric data are used for retrieving the 3D information of building, due to their precise phase information. However, such methodology suffers from the relatively long time span that is required to obtain the data (e.g. TerraSAR-X repeat-pass: 11 days). SAR radargrammetry, on the contrary, has the advantage that the required acquisitions are obtained in shorter time spans, what can be helpful in cases where rapid response is on demand. By matching corresponding points of a stereo image pair, surface height can be retrieved. Our approach propose to determine 3D building parameters, especially height information, relying on the radargrammetric analysis of building layover areas. In this paper, we newly combined a hierarchical matching approach with a matching criterion based on the coefficient of variation. Our method shows improvement if compared to previous works.