Surface subsidence monitoring with an improved distributed scatterer interferometric SAR time series method in a filling mining area

Abstract

Statistically homogeneous pixel (SHP) selection and DS phase optimization are two critical steps in the distributed scatterer interferometric SAR (DS-InSAR) time series method. In this paper, a new algorithm named dynamic hypothesis test of confidence interval (D-HTCI) is proposed, which reduces the wrong selection rate of SHP and increases the number of SHP selections. Using adaptive spatial nonlocal filtering method for DS phase optimization, the phase standard deviation (PSD) and the sum of phase differences (SPD) show that compared with the traditional covariance matrix decomposition method, the optimization quality is improved by 2.1 and 1.8 times, respectively. Combining 24 scenes Sentinel-1A data from September 17, 2017 to July 14, 2018, the method is applied to monitor surface subsidence of the Daizhuang filling mining area (Jining, Shandong, China). The results show that the proposed method has mm-level accuracy for monitoring of surface subsidence in a filling mining area.

Keywords:

• Remote sensing
• DS-InSAR
• surface subsidence
• filling mining area
• SHP selection
• DS phase optimization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant No. 2019XKQYMS23. The authors would like to thank the European Space Agency for providing Sentinel-1A data.