Spatially explicit feature importance for building height estimation using research-access high-resolution SAR and optical sensors

Abstract

Accurate building height information at the individual footprint scale is essential for material stock accounting and post-disaster damage assessments yet remains difficult to obtain at city scale in the Global South where airborne LiDAR coverage is rare and commercial very high-resolution imagery is cost-prohibitive or unavailable. While recent works have demonstrated building height estimation using freely available Sentinel imagery, the resolution ceiling of resulting products is still coarse for material stock analysis. This study incorporates products derived from data freely accessible under scientific research licenses, TerraSAR-X StripMap and PlanetScope, alongside Sentinel-1 to predict building heights in a large city in Brazil. To account for the spatial autocorrelation in the training set, features from all sources are integrated in a geographically weighted random forest model, returning an RMSE of 5.34 m and R2 of 0.756 against a LiDAR reference dataset. Local feature importance showed predictor dominance to vary consistently across intra-urban contexts, with footprint geometry dominating for low-rise buildings, shadow-derived height for taller and more isolated structures, and spectral reflectance for the tallest buildings in the set. Sentinel-1 backscatter and InSAR occupy complementary spatial niches, with no single sensor uniformly preferable across the set. Results provide optioneering guidance and insight over satellite-derived products predictive relevance in distinct contexts, which global machine learning or neural network models cannot offer.