Efficient nonparametric extraction of urban footprint from VHR SAR images

Very-High-Resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar (VHR-SAR) images are of particular interest to characterize and monitor urban areas at a global scale. While automatic urban footprint extraction from SAR images can be theoretically performed at very high spatial and temporal resolutions, in practice it requires a huge amount of processing time and memory resources for a global coverage. The paper presents a fast procedure for 1m-resolution Spotlight mode scene analysis which shows limited memory requirements and robustness to one-look speckle disturbance. The proposed method adopts a multiscale approach, with a radiometrically scalable scheme. Experimental results with objective assessment on Spotlight Cosmo-SkyMED images are presented and validated on reference urban classes provided by the Copernicus Urban Atlas 2012 of the European Space Agency.