Segmentation of interferometric SAR data for building detection

The improved quality of InSAR data suggests to utilise such data for building detection. But, the phase information from which the height data is calculated, is often severely disturbed, depending on the signal to noise ratio. In this paper we refer to investigations to stabilise and improve the InSAR height data. After speckle filtering, a segmentation of the intensity data is carried out. With these segments height data are masked and an average height is calculated using the related intensity values as weights. In a post-processing step, possible existing over- and under-segmentation are corrected. Adjacent objects with similar heights are merged and objects including shadow areas are split. Different tasks are distinguished for utilisation of the derived 3D information. A test site including the airport of Frankfurt (Main) was chosen. For the visualisation purpose, the segmentation result is shown. The results are compared to a vector map and differences are depicted and discussed.