SAR AND OBLIQUE AERIAL OPTICAL IMAGE FUSION FOR URBAN AREA IMAGE SEGMENTATION

Abstract. The fusion of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and optical data is a dynamic research area, but image segmentation is rarely treated. While a few studies use low-resolution nadir-view optical images, we approached the segmentation of SAR and optical images acquired from the same airborne platform – leading to an oblique view with high resolution and thus increased complexity. To overcome the geometric differences, we generated a digital surface model (DSM) from adjacent optical images and used it to project both the DSM and SAR data into the optical camera frame, followed by segmentation with each channel. The fused segmentation algorithm was found to out-perform the single-channel version.