Extraction of industrial buildings from stereoscopic airborne radar images

This paper deals with automatic extraction of 3-D buildings from stereoscopic high-resolution images recorded by the RAMSES sensor. Roofs are not very textured whereas typical strong L-shaped echoes are visible. These returns generally result from dihedral corners between ground and structures. They provide a part of the building footprints and the ground altitude, but not building heights. Thus, we present an adapted process including two main steps: - stereoscopic structure extraction from L-shaped echoes. Buildings are detected on each image using the Hough transform. Then they are recognised during a stereoscopic refinement stage based on a criterion minimisation. - height measurement. As most of previous extracted footprints indicate the ground altitude, building heights are found by monoscopic and stereoscopic measures. Between structures, ground altitudes are obtained by a dense matching process. This processing is applied on an industrial scene. Results are compared with a ground truth. Advantages and limitations of the method are brought out.