This paper describes the development of techniques for the production of urban mapping data from interferometric polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data. The information contained in the radar data originates from four types of data properties:• Radiometric, i.e. the channel intensities • Polarimetric, e.g. decomposition properties entropy and alpha •Interferometric, e.g. coherence and interferometric height • Geometric, e.g. shape and area A multi-scale analysis, using the infrastructure provided by eCognition image analysis software, enables these different sources of information to be brought together. Ambiguities that result from the use of radiometric and polarimetric information alone are eliminated. A map product with broad classification information is produced. Validated results for urban scenes are presented, that were produced using data from the Deutsche Luft und Raumfahrt system E-SAR.

An experiment was carried out over the Thames basin in the UK to derive a 1" (20m) Digital Elevation Model (DEM) from ERS tandem IfSAR using a commercially available processing system from Phoenix Systems. A quality assessment is shown of the IfSAR-DEM when compared against DTED-1 (lOOm resolution, courtesy of MCE Feltham, UK) and the Institute of Hydrology's hydrological DTM (IHDTM) [1,2], a 50m DTM derived from water features and contours from Ordnance Survey 1 :50,000 maps. Hydrological network extraction algorithms were applied to the IfSAR-DEM and the subsequent networks were compared against those available from cartographic sources. An assessment is made of the potential value of such IRARDEMs for global high resolution hydrological network extraction, particularly in the light of the forthcoming NASA SRTM mission.