Insar Phase Profiles at Building Locations

The improved ground resolution of state-of-the-art synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensors suggests utilizing SAR data for the analysis of urban areas. Building recognition however suffers from the consequences of the inherent side-looking viewing geometry of SAR, particularly occlusion and layover hinder the analysis. Usually extracted layover regions are not considered further in the recognition workflow. However, since layover regions contain information mixture of the building and its surrounding area, it is worthwhile to make efforts to understand such signal in order to tell different contributions of building façade and roof apart from those of other objects aiming at improvement of recognition. Considering InSAR data conspicuous phase distributions at building locations are observable. The concerned area begins always at the building parts facing the sensor, in extreme cases even the entire data of the building area is inferred by layover. The characteristics of the phase profile in range direction depend on sensor and illumination properties as well as on geometric attributes of buildings. The processed interferometric phase information of a single range cell may result from superposition of several signal contributions of backscatters with same range distance to the sensor. In this paper, a model is presented to calculate the expected interferometric phase values based on a given surface profile. The process takes into account that a mixture of several contributions defines the interferometric phase of a single range cell. Based on this model, simulations shall be included in an iterative analysis-by-synthesis approach for building recognition from multi-aspect InSAR data. The focus of the proposed model is to understand the impact of the building’s geometry on the phase profiles, material properties are not considered in the present state. The assessment process of the simulated phase profiles is performed by comparison with real InSAR data, based on phase values of single range lines. * Corresponding author. This is useful to know for communication with the appropriate person in cases with more than one author.