Terrasar-x for Urban Areas Monitoring: Novelties and Promises of High Resolution

This paper shows the suitability of High Resolution (HR) TerraSAR-X data for monitoring urban areas by means of feature extraction algorithms able to exploit the new information content provided by HR Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. The approach we follow is deterministic and model-based, meaning that the building feature extraction is based on the direct inversion of the electromagnetic scattered field as proposed in [1-4]; the novelty of high resolution is faced adapting the geometric model of the building in order to consider also the presence of windows, balconies or, more in general, of dihedral and trihedral configurations which can now be sensed by the SAR. Consequently, the scattering model is tailored to take into account also contributions from such geometries. With this approach many and different TerraSAR-X data have been analyzed investigating also the most suitable products for this kind of feature extraction.