Coherent Markov Random Field-Based Unreliable DSM Areas Segmentation and Hierarchical Adaptive Surface Fitting for InSAR DEM Reconstruction

A digital elevation model (DEM) can be obtained by removing ground objects, such as buildings, in a digital surface model (DSM) generated by the interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) system. However, the imaging mechanism will cause unreliable DSM areas such as layover and shadow in the building areas, which seriously affect the elevation accuracy of the DEM generated from the DSM. Driven by above problem, this paper proposed a novel DEM reconstruction method. Coherent Markov random field (CMRF) was first used to segment unreliable DSM areas. With the help of coherence coefficients and residue information provided by the InSAR system, CMRF has shown better segmentation results than traditional traditional Markov random field (MRF) which only use fixed parameters to determine the neighborhood energy. Based on segmentation results, the hierarchical adaptive surface fitting (with gradually changing the grid size and adaptive threshold) was set up to locate the non-ground points. The adaptive surface fitting was superior to the surface fitting-based method with fixed grid size and threshold of height differences. Finally, interpolation based on an inverse distance weighted (IDW) algorithm combining coherence coefficient was performed to reconstruct a DEM. The airborne InSAR data from the Institute of Electronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences has been researched, and the experimental results show that our method can filter out buildings and identify natural terrain effectively while retaining most of the terrain features.