Mapping Building Heights at Large Scales Using Sentinel-1 Radar Imagery and Nighttime Light Data

Human settlement areas significantly impact the environment, leading to changes in both natural and built environments. Comprehensive information on human settlements, particularly in urban areas, is crucial for effective sustainable development planning. However, urban land use investigations are often limited to two-dimensional building footprint maps, neglecting the three-dimensional aspect of building structures. This paper addresses this issue to contribute to Sustainable Development Goal 11, which focuses on making human settlements inclusive, safe, and sustainable. In this study, Sentinel-1 data are used as the primary source to estimate building heights. One challenge addressed is the issue of multiple backscattering in Sentinel-1’s signal, particularly in densely populated areas with high-rise buildings. To mitigate this, firstly, Sentinel-1 data from different directions, orbit paths, and polarizations are utilized. Combining ascending and descending orbits significantly improves estimation accuracy, and incorporating a higher number of paths provides additional information. However, Sentinel-1 data alone are not sufficiently rich at a global scale across different orbits and polarizations. Secondly, to enhance the accuracy further, Sentinel-1 data are corrected using nighttime light data as additional information, which shows promising results in addressing multiple backscattering issues. Finally, a deep learning model is trained to generate building height maps using these features, achieving a mean absolute error of around 2 m and a mean square error of approximately 13. The generalizability of this method is demonstrated in several cities with diverse built-up structures, including London, Berlin, and others. Finally, a building height map of Iran is generated and evaluated against surveyed buildings, showcasing its large-scale mapping capability.