Urban footprint from VHR SAR images: Toward a fully operational procedure

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 onelook speckle disturbance. The proposed method adopts a multiscale approach, with a radiometrically scalable scheme, and exploits theoretic electromagnetic scattering models of buildings. Experimental results with objective assessment on spotlight Cosmo-SkyMED images will be presented and validated on reference urban classes provided by the Copernicus Urban Atlas 2012.