mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Reconstructing Building Height from Spaceborne TomoSAR Point Clouds Using a Dual-Topology Network

arXiv 2601.00658 ↗First posted 2 Jan 2026cs.CVcited by 2

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Abstract (arXiv)

Reliable building height estimation is essential for various urban applications. Spaceborne SAR tomography (TomoSAR) provides weather-independent, side-looking observations that capture facade-level structure, offering a promising alternative to conventional optical methods. However, TomoSAR point clouds often suffer from noise, anisotropic point distributions, and data voids on incoherent surfaces, all of which hinder accurate height reconstruction. To address these challenges, we introduce a learning-based framework for converting raw TomoSAR points into high-resolution building height maps. Our dual-topology network alternates between a point branch that models irregular scatterer features and a grid branch that enforces spatial consistency. By jointly processing these representations, the network denoises the input points and inpaints missing regions to produce continuous height estimates. To our knowledge, this is the first proof of concept for large-scale urban height mapping directly from TomoSAR point clouds. Extensive experiments on data from Munich and Berlin validate the effectiveness of our approach. Moreover, we demonstrate that our framework can be extended to incorporate optical satellite imagery, further enhancing reconstruction quality. The source code is available at https://github.com/zhu-xlab/tomosar2height.

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 17 of its 47 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Jan 2026.

Builds on

17 of 47 references.

References · 17

  1. 2015U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentationcited by 19,604
  2. 2016PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentationcited by 5,223
  3. 2017PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Spacecited by 4,384
  4. 2020Convolutional Occupancy Networkscited by 760
  5. 2018IM2HEIGHT: Height Estimation from Single Monocular Imagery via Fully Residual Convolutional-Deconvolutional Networkcited by 31
  6. 2022ALTO: Alternating Latent Topologies for Implicit 3D Reconstructioncited by 21
  7. 2021Large-scale Building Height Retrieval from Single SAR Imagery based on Bounding Box Regression Networkscited by 10
  8. 2023PolyGNN: Polyhedron-based Graph Neural Network for 3D Building Reconstruction from Point Cloudscited by 10
  9. 2022ImpliCity: City Modeling from Satellite Images with Deep Implicit Occupancy Fieldscited by 9
  10. 2023HTC-DC Net: Monocular Height Estimation from Single Remote Sensing Imagescited by 8
  11. 2021Deep-Learning-Based Single-Image Height Reconstruction from Very-High-Resolution SAR Intensity Datacited by 6
  12. 2021boldsymbolγ-Net: Superresolving SAR Tomographic Inversion via Deep Learningcited by 5
5 more
  1. 2020SAR Tomography at the Limit: Building Height Reconstruction Using Only 3-5 TanDEM-X Bistatic Interferogramscited by 4
  2. 2022Disentangled Latent Transformer for Interpretable Monocular Height Estimationcited by 3
  3. 2018Non-Local Compressive Sensing Based SAR Tomographycited by 2
  4. 2023Basis Pursuit Denoising via Recurrent Neural Network Applied to Super-resolving SAR Tomographycited by 1
  5. 2023HyperLISTA-ABT: An Ultra-light Unfolded Network for Accurate Multi-component Differential Tomographic SAR Inversioncited by 1

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

2 papers.