An Improved Iterative Simulation and Matching Scheme for Building Height Retrieval From SAR Image

Retrieval of building height from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image is of great significance for damage assessment after natural disasters, urban development and planning, and dynamic time series monitoring in urban areas. Based on the prior information of the building and the radar platform, the building height can be estimated by iteratively simulating the SAR image and matching it with the measured SAR image. However, the estimation accuracy would be affected inevitably when there is error of prior information introduced by instable platform or inaccuracy of measuring instruments. In this letter, the beam incident angle and building height are both used as search variables for iterative simulation and matching (ISM), and normalized mutual information (NMI) is used to measure the similarity between the simulated image and the measured image to achieve an accurate estimation of building height. At last, measured data experiments are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.