The three-dimensional (3D) information of buildings can describe the horizontal and vertical development of a city. The GaoFen-7 (GF-7) stereo-mapping satellite can provide multi-view and multi-spectral satellite images, which can clearly describe the fine spatial details within urban areas, while the feasibility of extracting building 3D information from GF-7 image remains understudied. This article establishes an automated method for extracting building footprints and height information from GF-7 satellite imagery. First, we propose a multi-stage attention U-Net (MSAU-Net) architecture for building footprint extraction from multi-spectral images. Then, we generate the point cloud from the multi-view image and construct normalized digital surface model (nDSM) to represent the height of off-terrain objects. Finally, the building height is extracted from the nDSM and combined with the results of building footprints to obtain building 3D information. We select Beijing as the study area to test the proposed method, and in order to verify the building extraction ability of MSAU-Net, we choose GF-7 self-annotated building dataset and a public dataset (WuHan University (WHU) Building Dataset) for model testing, while the accuracy is evaluated in detail through comparison with other models. The results are summarized as follows: (1) In terms of building footprint extraction, our method can achieve intersection-over-union indicators of 89.31% and 80.27% for the WHU Dataset and GF-7 self-annotated datasets, respectively; these values are higher than the results of other models. (2) The root mean square between the extracted building height and the reference building height is 5.41 m, and the mean absolute error is 3.39 m. In summary, our method could be useful for accurate and automatic 3D building information extraction from GF-7 satellite images, and have good application potential.

A microwave scattering model is a powerful tool for determining relationships between vegetation parameters and backscattering characteristics. The crown shape of the vegetation canopy is an important parameter in forestry and affects the microwave scattering modeling results. However, there are few numerical models or methods to describe the relationships between crown shapes and backscattering features. Using the Modified Tor Vergata Model (MTVM), a microwave scattering model based on the Matrix Doubling Algorithm (MDA), we quantitatively characterized the effects of crown shape on the microwave backscattering coefficients of the vegetation canopy. FEKO was also used as a computational electromagnetic method to make a complement and comparison with MTVM. In a preliminary experiment, the backscattering coefficients of two ideal vegetation canopies with four representative crown shapes (cylinder, cone, inverted cone and ellipsoid) were simulated: MTVM simulations were performed for the L (1.2 GHz), C (5.3 GHz) and X (9.6 GHz) bands in fully polarimetric mode, and FEKO simulations were carried out for the C (5.3 GHz) band at VV and VH polarization. The simulation results show that, for specific input parameters, the mean relative differences in backscattering coefficients due to variations in crown shape are as high as 127%, which demonstrates that the crown shape has a non-negligible influence on microwave backscattering coefficients of the vegetation canopy. In turn, this also suggests that investigation on effects of plant crown shape on microwave backscattering coefficients may have the potential to improve the accuracy of vegetation microwave scattering models, especially in canopies where volume scattering is the predominant mechanism.