Hough Transform and Clustering for a 3-D Building Reconstruction with Tomographic SAR Point Clouds

Tomographic synthetic aperture radar (TomoSAR) produces 3-D point clouds with unavoidable noise or false targets that seriously deteriorate the quality of 3-D images and the building reconstruction over urban areas. In this paper, a Hough transform was adopted to detect the outline of a building; however, on one hand, the obtained outline of a building with Hough transform is broken, and on the other hand, some of these broken lines belong to the same segment of a building outline, but the parameters of these lines are slightly different. These problems will lead to that segment of a building outline being represented by multiple different parameters in the Hough transform. Therefore, an unsupervised clustering method was employed for clustering these line parameters. The lines gathered in the same cluster were considered to correspond to a same segment of a building outline. In this way, different line parameters corresponding to a segment of a building outline were integrated into one and then the continuous outline of the building in cloud points was obtained. Steps of the proposed data processing method were as follows. First, the Hough transform was made use of to detect the lines on the tomography plane in TomoSAR point clouds. These detected lines lay on the outline of the building, but they were broken due to the density variation of point clouds. Second, the lines detected using the Hough transform were grouped as a date set for training the building outline. Unsupervised clustering was utilized to classify the lines in several clusters. The cluster number was automatically determined via the unsupervised clustering algorithm, which meant the number of straight segments of the building edge was obtained. The lines in each cluster were considered to belong to the same straight segment of the building outline. Then, within each cluster, which represents a part or a segment of the building edge, a repaired straight line was constructed. Third, between each two clusters or each two segments of the building outline, the joint point was estimated by extending the two segments. Therefore, the building outline was obtained as completely as possible. Finally, taking the estimated building outline as the clustering center, supervised learning algorithm was used to classify the building cloud point and the noise (or false targets), then the building cloud point was refined. Then, our refined and unrefined data were fed into the neural network for building the 3-D construction. The comparison results show the correctness and the effectiveness of our improved method.