Auto-extraction of Building Outline with Multi-band Polarimetric SAR

Multi-band Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (Multiband-PolSAR) has the capability to obtain multiple observations of ground objects in the two dimensions of frequency and polarization with potential applications in ground information extraction. However, SAR data dimension increase will result in more complex work for data processing and application. Compared with processing single-band single-polarization SAR data, multiband-PolSAR data requires additional consideration of Multiband-PolSAR data registration and fusion. The aim of this study is auto-extraction of building outline with the data obtained by an airborne Multiband-PolSAR system led by Chinese Academy of Sciences and supported by the National High-resolution Observation System Major Project. This study involves the SAR-SIFT method for registration, and proposes a fusion method based on scattering mechanism, to improve the automatic unsupervised building outline extraction method proposed by Ferro et al. (doi: 10.1109/TGRS.2012.2205156), and then forms a new automatic building outline extraction method using Multiband-PolSAR images. The experimental results show that the fusion of multi-band and multi-polarization information will give rise to the contrast of feature image, the continuity of the adjacent pixels, and the accuracy of building extraction. This paper makes a bridge between Multiband-PolSAR technology and building extraction application. Moreover, this article creates conditions for the research on 3D building structure reconstruction by using Multiband-PolSAR data.