An Object-Based Deep Learning Approach for Building Height Estimation from Single SAR Images

Abstract: Accurate estimation of building heights using very high resolution (VHR) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery is crucial for various urban applications. This paper introduces a Deep Learning (DL)-based methodology for automated building height estimation from single VHR COSMO-SkyMed images: an object-based regression approach based on bounding box detection followed by height estimation. This model was trained and evaluated on a unique multi-continental dataset comprising eight geographically diverse cities across Europe, North and South America, and Asia, employing a cross-validation strategy to explicitly assess out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. The results demonstrate highly promising performance, particularly on European cities where the model achieves a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of approximately one building story (2.20 m in Munich), significantly outperforming recent state-of-the-art methods in similar OOD scenarios. Despite the increased variability observed when generalizing to cities in other continents, particularly in Asia with its distinct urban typologies and prevalence of high-rise structures, this study underscores the significant potential of DL for robust cross-city and cross-continental transfer learning in building height estimation from single VHR SAR data.