Circular SAR imagery for urban remote sensing

Abstract

Building extraction using SAR imagery has been a subject of interest since the availability of high resolution SAR images. One of the main advantages of this technique is that SAR imagery does not depend on weather conditions. The main drawback is the slant range geometry which leads to large shadow areas, and therefore to incomplete dataset. Authors have tried to use images from different points of view in order to fill the gaps and ease the extraction step. In this pape, we take advantage of an acquisition of SAR data over a circular trajectory to extract DEM. The new SETHI sensor from ONERA is an airborne radar equipped with different bands (P, L, X) on a Falcon 20. Data were acquired over the city of Nimes in September 2007 in X, L and P band with a circular trajectory so that images could be processed for all the possible azimuth angles. The X data have a 45 cm slant range resolution. In this paper we present the SAR processing of such data and we analyse the interest of this configuration for the study of building extraction.