Title :
Persistent Scatterer Pair Interferometry: Approach and Application to COSMO-SkyMed SAR Data
Author :
Costantini, Mario ; Falco, Salvatore ; Malvarosa, Fabio ; Minati, Federico ; Trillo, Francesco ; Vecchioli, Francesco
Author_Institution :
e-GEOS-an Italian Space Agency (ASI), Telespazio Co., Rome, Italy
Abstract :
Persistent scatterer interferometry is a widely used technique to detect and monitor slow terrain movements, with millimetric accuracy, from satellite synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data. We have recently proposed a method, named persistent scatterer pair (PSP), aimed at overcoming some limitations of standard techniques. The PSP method is characterized by the fact of exploiting only the relative properties of neighboring pairs of points for both detection and analysis of persistent scatterers (PSs), intended in the general sense of scatterers that exhibit interferometric coherence for the time period and baseline span of the acquisitions, including both point-like and distributed scatterers. Thanks to the pair-of-point approach, the PSP technique is intrinsically not affected by artifacts slowly variable in space, like those depending on atmosphere or orbits. Moreover, by exploiting a very redundant set of pair-of-point connections, the PSP approach guarantees extremely dense and accurate displacement and elevation measurements, both in correspondence of structures and when the backscattering is weak or distributed as in the case of natural terrains. In all cases, the measurements keep the full resolution of the input SAR images. In this work, the qualifying characteristics of the PSP technique are described, and several application examples and validation tests based on COSMO-SkyMed data are reported, which demonstrate the validity of the proposed approach.
Keywords :
backscatter; displacement measurement; environmental monitoring (geophysics); geomorphology; radar interferometry; remote sensing by radar; synthetic aperture radar; terrain mapping; COSMO-SkyMed SAR data; PSP technique; backscattering; displacement measurement; distributed scatterers; elevation measurement; interferometric coherence; millimetric accuracy; natural terrain; pair-of-point approach; pair-of-point connections; persistent scatterer analysis; persistent scatterer detection; persistent scatterer pair interferometry; point-like scatterers; satellite SAR data; satellite synthetic aperture radar data; slow terrain movement detection; slow terrain movement monitoring; Atmospheric measurements; Coherence; Displacement measurement; Extraterrestrial measurements; Interferometry; Synthetic aperture radar; Terrain factors; Distributed scatterers; geophysical measurement techniques; ground displacement measurement; persistent scatterers (PSs); synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometry;
Journal_Title :
Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, IEEE Journal of
DOI :
10.1109/JSTARS.2014.2343915