Perceptual grouping for automatic detection of man-made structures in high-resolution SAR data

Modern airborne synthetic aperture radar sensors provide high spatial resolution data. Experimental systems have even achieved decimetre resolution. In such data, many features of urban objects can be identified, which are beyond what has been achieved by radar remote sensing before. An example for the new quality of the appearance of urban man-made objects such as buildings in these data is given and interpreted. The fine level of detail opens the opportunity to reconstruct detailed structures of such objects from SAR data with structural pattern recognition techniques. Artificial intelligence concepts such as production systems provide proper means for this purpose. The feasibility of these methods is demonstrated here. Extended building features such as long thin roof edge lines, groups of salient point scatterers, and symmetric configurations are detected using principles from perceptual grouping and Gestalt psychology. These are good continuation, similarity, proximity and symmetry.