Fine-Grained 3D Building Reconstruction and Floor Height Estimation from Ultra-High-Resolution TomoSAR Data Using Geometric Constraints

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.

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Publication Details

Journal
Remote Sensing
Published
2026-04-02
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/rs18071073
Primary Topic
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Applications and Techniques
Type
article
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article

Fine-Grained 3D Building Reconstruction and Floor Height Estimation from Ultra-High-Resolution TomoSAR Data Using Geometric Constraints

Wenkang Liu, Haoyuan Chen, Mengdao Xing, Lei Cui et al.
Remote Sensing
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Applications and Techniques
article

Fine-Grained 3D Building Reconstruction and Floor Height Estimation from Ultra-High-Resolution TomoSAR Data Using Geometric Constraints

Wenkang Liu, Haoyuan Chen, Mengdao Xing, Lei Cui, Quan Chen
article en

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.

Remote SensingVol. 18(7)
Xidian University (CN), Shanghai Micro Satellite Engineering Center (CN)
Sustainable cities and communities
Openalex Percentile: Top 19%
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Applications and Techniques
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Fine-Grained 3D Building Reconstruction and Floor Height Estimation from Ultra-High-Resolution TomoSAR Data Using Geometric Constraints — Wenkang Liu, Haoyuan Chen, et al. · Remote Sensing (2026) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS