Fine-Grained 3D Building Reconstruction and Floor Height Estimation from Ultra-High-Resolution TomoSAR Data Using Geometric Constraints
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: The automatic generation of semantic Level of Detail (LOD) 2 models from TomoSAR point clouds is frequently compromised by elevation side-lobes, data sparsity, and inherent geometric distortions. In particular, the energy dispersion caused by side-lobes blurs vertical structures, making the extraction of floor details and accurate floor height estimation significantly challenging. To overcome these limitations, we present a refined reconstruction framework that tightly couples tomographic imaging mechanisms with building geometric priors. For fine-grained vertical reconstruction, we employ a geometry-constrained inverse projection strategy that concentrates scattered energy back onto the building façade to mitigate side-lobe interference. This is complemented by a Global Coherent Integration method, utilizing spectral analysis to robustly recover periodic floor patterns and estimate average floor heights. In the horizontal domain, we address the conflict between noise suppression and feature preservation through a separation-of-axes morphological strategy. Unlike traditional isotropic filtering, this approach processes orthogonal directions independently to bridge data gaps while strictly maintaining sharp building corners and recovering fine substructures. Validated on airborne Ku-band datasets, the proposed method demonstrates the capability to produce topologically complete and semantically rich urban models from sparse radar observations.
Source: Remote Sensing
DOI: 10.3390/rs18071073
Institutions: Xidian University, Guangzhou Institute of Technology
Language: English
Subfield: Aerospace Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,258
OpenAlex ID: W7150195398