Utilizing Building Offset and Shadow to Retrieve Urban Building Heights with ICESat-2 Photons

Building height serves as an essential feature of urban morphology that provides valuable insights into human socio-cultural behaviors and their impact on the environment in an urban milieu. However, openly accessible building height information at the individual building level is still lacking and...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Remote sensing (Basel, Switzerland) Switzerland), 2023-08, Vol.15 (15), p.3786
Main Authors: Wu, Bin, Huang, Hailan, Zhao, Yi
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accuracy
building height
building offset
building shadow
Buildings
Deep learning
Environmental impact
Height
High resolution
ICESat-2
Image resolution
Lasers
Morphology
Multitasking
Optimization techniques
Photons
Remote sensing
Shadows
Teaching methods
Urban areas
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Summary:Building height serves as an essential feature of urban morphology that provides valuable insights into human socio-cultural behaviors and their impact on the environment in an urban milieu. However, openly accessible building height information at the individual building level is still lacking and remains sorely limited. Previous studies have shown that the ICESat-2′s ATL03/08 products are of good accuracy for urban building heights retrieval, however, these studies are limited to areas with available data coverage. To this end, we propose a method for extracting urban building height by using ICESat-2 ATL03 photons and high-resolution remote sensing images. We first extracted the information of building roof to footprint offsets and building shadows from high resolution imagery using multitasking CNN frameworks. Using the building height samples calculated from ICESat-2 ATL03 photons, we developed a building height estimation method that combines building offset and shadow length information. We assessed the efficacy of the proposed method in the Wujiaochang area of Shanghai city, China. The results indicated that the proposed method is able to extract building height with a MAE of 4.7 m, and outperforms the traditional shadow-based and offset-based method. We believe that the proposed method is a good candidate for accurately retrieving building heights on a city-wide scale.
ISSN:2072-4292
2072-4292
DOI:10.3390/rs15153786