Automatic large Area Reconstruction of Building Facades from Spaceborne TomoSAR Point Clouds

Improved resolution of SAR sensors and advanced multipass interferometric techniques, such as tomographic SAR inversion (TomoSAR), opens up new possibilities of 4D (or even higher dimensional) imaging that can be potentially used to reconstruct dynamic models of entire cities, i.e., city models that can incorporate temporal (motion) behaviour along with the 3D information. Motivated by these chances, this paper presents an approach that systematically allows automatic reconstruction of building façades from 4D point cloud generated from tomographic SAR processing and put particular focus on robust reconstruction of large areas. The approach is modular and is illustrated/validated by examples using TomoSAR point clouds generated from a stack of TerraSAR-X high-resolution spotlight images from ascending orbit covering approx. 2 km2 high rise area in the city of Las Vegas