Accuracy Assessment of Building Height Estimation from a High Resolution Optical Image Combined with a Simulated Sar Image

Modern space borne SAR sensors like TerraSAR-X and COSMO-SkyMed are capable of acquiring images with a geometric ground resolution of one meter. Airborne sensors achieve even higher ground resolution. In such very high resolution SAR imagery single objects like houses and bridges become visible. However, effects due to the side-looking slant range acquisition principle of SAR, layover, foreshortening, and shadowing, complicate the interpretability of such data. Hence, one possibility is to combine extracted features from SAR imagery with features from optical images for the purpose of enhancing object recognition and reconstruction. In order to precisely combine features from both data sets within a unique statistical framework, the imaging properties and occurring effects have to be well understood. In this paper, simulations of a dense urban scene are compared to a real TerraSAR-X image. * Corresponding author. This is useful to know for communication with the appropriate person in cases with more than one author.