Title :
Extension of 4-D SAR Imaging to the Monitoring of Thermally Dilating Scatterers
Author :
Reale, Diego ; Fornaro, Gianfranco ; Pauciullo, Antonio
Author_Institution :
Inst. for the Electromagn. Sensing of the Environ. (IREA), Naples, Italy
Abstract :
The new generation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensors is providing images with very high spatial resolution, up to the meter scale. Such an increase of resolution allows a more effective monitoring of ground structures by means of interferometric approaches. SAR-tomography-based approaches use not only the phase but also the amplitude of the received data: they have shown better capabilities with respect to classical persistent scatterers interferometry approaches in monitoring ground scatterers in terms of detection and estimation accuracy and offer the possibility to resolve multiple scatterers. First results on TerraSAR-X data have demonstrated impressive capabilities in the reconstruction of single buildings and in the monitoring of their deformation. However, the use of higher frequency increases the sensitivity of the system even to minute changes such as thermal dilations. In this paper, we address extension of tomographic based approaches to the monitoring of structure thermal dilation. Aspects related to the coupling of estimated deformation parameters, and in general of the estimation accuracy, as well as problems of scatterers detection are deeply investigated. Results on real data are shown to demonstrate the capability of the technique to distinguish linear deformation and thermal dilation and to increase the quality of the monitoring, as well as to highlight coupling effects.
Keywords :
geophysical image processing; image reconstruction; radar imaging; radar interferometry; synthetic aperture radar; 4-D SAR imaging extension; SAR-tomography-based approaches; TerraSAR-X data; deformation monitoring; ground structures; image reconstruction; image resolution; interferometric approaches; linear deformation; persistent scatterers interferometry; single buildings; synthetic aperture radar sensors; thermal dilations; thermally dilating scatterers monitoring; Backscatter; Monitoring; Synthetic aperture radar; Thermal sensors; Tomography; Vectors; Differential interferometric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) (InSAR) (DInSAR); SAR tomography; TerraSAR-X (TSX); multidimensional SAR imaging (MDI-SAR); thermal dilation;
Journal_Title :
Geoscience and Remote Sensing, IEEE Transactions on
DOI :
10.1109/TGRS.2012.2233205