Carsten Jürgens (Ed.): Remote Sensing - New Challenges of High Resolution, Bochum 2008

The new spaceborne very high resolution (VHR) SAR sensors onboard the TerraSAR-X and COSMO-SkyMED satellites have a spatial resolution of up to 1 meter. In VHR SAR data, features from individual urban structures, like buildings, can be identified in their characteristic settings in urban settlement patterns. In the context of situation assessment as initial reaction to man made or natural crisis events, information extraction methodologies relying on data which can be derived from operational civilian spaceborne sensors are of special importance. In this paper, we present a novel 3D reconstruction methodology using hybrid VHR optical and detected SAR imagery that is able to estimate the height of a generic man made structure from a single power VHR SAR image. The proposed approach is based on the combined application of a radar simulator and a matching procedure, which evaluates the match between the actual SAR scene and the simulations of an object with different heights. The estimated height corresponds to the height of the object, whose simulation matches best with the actual scene. The efficiency and the generic aspect of the proposed method, is demonstrated for the height estimation of the pyramids in Giza, Egypt from VHR TerraSAR-X data.