High-resolution SAR data: New opportunities and challenges for the analysis of urban areas

Leading-edge airborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensors provide spatial resolutions on the order of a decimetre. In such data, many features of urban objects can be identified, which were beyond the scope of radar remote sensing before. The impact of high-resolution SAR data on the analysis of urban scenes is discussed. An example for the new quality of the appearance of buildings in such data is given and interpreted. The fine level of detail opens the opportunity to reconstruct the structure of man-made objects (e.g. buildings). The problem of the high computational load required for the processing and the image analysis of high-resolution SAR data is discussed. Finally, the topics geocoding and data fusion using different kinds of reference elevation data are addressed.