ISPRS-Archives The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences ISPRS-Archives Int. Arch. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci. 2194-9034 Copernicus Publications Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/isprs-archives-XLII-1-W1-55-2017 EXPLOITATION OF DIGITAL SURFACE MODELS GENERATED FROM WORLDVIEW-2 DATA FOR SAR SIMULATION TECHNIQUES Ilehag R. 1 Auer S. 2 d’Angelo P. 2 Institute of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Englerstr. 7, 76131 Karlsruhe, Germany Remote Sensing Technology Institute, German Aerospace Center (DLR), 82234 Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany 30 05 2017 XLII-1/W1 55 61 Copyright: © 2017 R. Ilehag et al. 2017 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This article is available from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLII-1-W1/55/2017/isprs-archives-XLII-1-W1-55-2017.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLII-1-W1/55/2017/isprs-archives-XLII-1-W1-55-2017.pdf

GeoRaySAR, an automated SAR simulator developed at DLR, identifies buildings in high resolution SAR data by utilizing geometric knowledge extracted from digital surface models (DSMs). Hitherto, the simulator has utilized DSMs generated from LiDAR data from airborne sensors with pre-filtered vegetation. Discarding the need for pre-optimized model input, DSMs generated from high resolution optical data (acquired with WorldView-2) are used for the extraction of building-related SAR image parts in this work. An automatic preprocessing of the DSMs has been developed for separating buildings from elevated vegetation (trees, bushes) and reducing the noise level. Based on that, automated simulations are triggered considering the properties of real SAR images. <br><br> Locations in three cities, Munich, London and Istanbul, were chosen as study areas to determine advantages and limitations related to WorldView-2 DSMs as input for GeoRaySAR. Beyond, the impact of the quality of the DSM in terms of building extraction is evaluated as well as evaluation of building DSM, a DSM only containing buildings. The results indicate that building extents can be detected with DSMs from optical satellite data with various success, dependent on the quality of the DSM as well as on the SAR imaging perspective.