Stereogrammetric Fusion of Optical and SAR Data for the Reconstruction of Urban Scenes

Project Leader
Dr.-Ing. Michael Schmitt

Contact Person
Dr.-Ing. Michael Schmitt

Cooperation Partners
Signal Processing in Earth Observation, Technical University of Munich
Remote Sensing Technology Institute, German Aerospace Center (DLR)

 

Stereogrammetric Fusion of Optical and SAR Data

The main subject of the scientific investigations within this project is the reconstruction of urban scenes by a stereogrammetric fusion of high-resolution spaceborne optical and SAR image data. The goal of this kind of sensor data fusion is to get a comprehensive three- dimensional description of urban topography. There are several reasons for this fusion: On the one hand, particularly spaceborne optical imagery are widely available and stored in great amounts in international Earth observation archives. On the other hand, also recent radar remote sensing missions, such as TerraSAR-X/TanDEM- X or CosmoSkymed, lead to a growing availability of high-resolution SAR data. Making use of the possibility to acquire new SAR data independently from daylight or weather conditions, this project wants to support the request to exploit existing archive data of regions of interest with greater flexibility but also to enable a timely mapping of critical areas by optimum combination of arbitrary satellite image data that is available on short notice. The results of this project will help to make the analysis of heterogeneous satellite image data as flexible as possible, in particular with respect to a rapid 3D mapping in time- critical applications.