Automatic Alignment of High Resolution Optical and SAR Images for Urban Areas

Abstract

This paper presents the basics and functionality of SimGeoI, a simulation-based framework for the automated interpretation and alignment of optical and SAR remote sensing data. SimGeoI has been developed in order to align optical and SAR data based on given geometric information about objects represented by digital surface models. Thereby, the analysis of urban scenes is possible with independence of sensor type and perspective. After a brief introduction of the processor environment, possible applications of the framework are indicated with results of a case study for Istanbul (WorldView-2 and TerraSAR-X data). In this context, opportunities in the context of a joint analysis of high resolution optical and SAR data are addressed, i.e. concerning data fusion, change detection, and machine learning tasks.