# SAR Tomography at the Limit: Building Height Reconstruction Using Only 3-5 TanDEM-X Bistatic Interferograms

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.07803 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07803/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 17 Mar 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [HTC-DC Net: Monocular Height Estimation from Single Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16486/) (2023)
- [Radar Fields: An Extension of Radiance Fields to SAR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12961/) (2023)
- [Reconstructing Building Height from Spaceborne TomoSAR Point Clouds Using a Dual-Topology Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.00658/) (2026)
- [Automatic satellite building construction monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15084/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-baseline interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) techniques are effective approaches for retrieving the 3-D information of urban areas. In order to obtain a plausible reconstruction, it is necessary to use more than twenty interferograms. Hence, these methods are commonly not appropriate for large-scale 3-D urban mapping using TanDEM-X data where only a few acquisitions are available in average for each city. This work proposes a new SAR tomographic processing framework to work with those extremely small stacks, which integrates the non-local filtering into SAR tomography inversion. The applicability of the algorithm is demonstrated using a TanDEM-X multi-baseline stack with 5 bistatic interferograms over the whole city of Munich, Germany. Systematic comparison of our result with TanDEM-X raw digital elevation models (DEM) and airborne LiDAR data shows that the relative height accuracy of two third buildings is within two meters, which outperforms the TanDEM-X raw DEM. The promising performance of the proposed algorithm paved the first step towards high quality large-scale 3-D urban mapping.