Building characterisation in VHR SAR data acquired under controlled EMSL conditions

The upcoming availability of new very high resolution SAR imagery from satellite sensors (e.g. Radarsat-2, TerraSAR-X, COSMOSkymed) has renewed interest in extraction of scene parameters for the characterisation of urban areas. In order to properly face this problem, we have defined a structured and hierarchical research strategy that follows a systematic approach to 3-D building characterisation in VHR SAR data. This research strategy, starting from a theoretical analysis based on the literature, aims at a more depth understanding of the backscattering behaviour in VHR SAR urban images on the basis of empirical tests on different experimental setups. These setups include trials in the EMSL, with the outdoor Linear Synthetic Aperture radar (LISA) and a final validation and tuning of the results on VHR SAR from airborne and satellite platforms. This paper describes the proposed research framework in general, and presents the results obtained from the first set of EMSL experiments aimed at analysing the effect of the viewing and aspect angles, i.e. the orientation of the building structure with respect to the SAR's azimuthal direction.