Automated Front Wall Feature Extraction and Material Assessment Using Fused LIDAR and Through-Wall Radar Imagery

Military forces operating in urban environments are facing numerous challenges. One of them consists in being able to identify buildings material to support missions involving tactical breach or blast damage prediction. This paper reports on a method that combines both LIDAR and through-wall radar imagery to provide detailed information about a building front wall features and its construction material. The LIDAR and 3-D through-wall synthetic aperture radar (TWSAR) are mounted on a vehicle which is driven in front of a building/wall of interest. The acquired LIDAR point cloud is post-processed to automatically extract information on the front wall of buildings using a plane search strategy and cluster extraction to generate a front wall occupancy grid. This occupancy grid is used by the through-wall radar processing algorithms to restrict imagery to the areas of the wall that are exempt of doors, windows, or any other external feature. Based on typical features found in the through-wall radar images of the front wall, the type of wall is categorized as vinyl/gypsum/wood studs, cinder block, brick and cinder block, poured concrete, or others. The combination of LIDAR and through-wall radar offers the unique opportunity to automate the front wall feature extraction and material assessment and to provide timely information to a potential user.