Fusion of InSAR Data and Other Sources for Infrastructure Monitoring

Dear Colleagues,

Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry is now an operational technology for the monitoring of millimetric displacements of the Earth surface over time scales of decades. Limits imposed by the requirement of coherence between the SAR images used to form interferograms can be partly relaxed by restricting the attention to terrain targets which remain stable for long time periods, and/or by using small temporal and spatial baseline interferograms, with recent developments going in the direction of blending together these approaches, exploiting the full data covariance.

Multi-temporal InSAR (MTI) techniques are therefore perfectly suited to the monitoring of infrastructures such as roads, railways, pipelines, power networks, dams, etc.

Nevertheless, MTI's high sensitivity is limited to scalar components of the total displacements of stable targets on the terrain surface. Moreover, measurement precision is affected by the presence of both vertical and lateral atmospheric inhomogeneities. Although several methods are available to reduce or bypass these shortcomings, the integration with independent data sources is considered to be very useful, if not indispensable, to obtain reliable information.

The huge and increasing quantity of high temporal and spatial resolution SAR remote sensing data, including the European Copernicus Sentinel-1 constellation, and the ongoing and forthcoming several national missions such as TerraSAR-X/-L, COSMO-SkyMed / CSK 2nd generation, ALOS 2, SAOCOM, etc., calls for a more systemic and capillary integration of multi-source remotely sensed information with other information sources, aimed at gaining a more objective and precise knowledge of the situation on the ground. This is especially true in the case of environmental hazard posed to infrastructures, where the need to fruitfully exploit the synoptic information coming from space sensors towards remedial and protection actions led by local authorities is more pressing.

This special issue welcomes significant contributions on topics such as the following:

• new MTI/InSAR processing techniques aimed at expanding sensitivity to small displacements, such as multi-track /multi-sensor integration, atmospheric effects estimation and removal, expansion of the class of detected targets (distributed, partially or temporally-limited coherent targets);
• new methods of classification /characterization of nonlinear, complex terrain displacements based on the availability of long MTI time series measurements;
• integration of MTI data with other remote sensing displacement monitoring techniques such as GPS, speckle tracking, etc.;
• integration with ground displacement monitoring devices such as inclinometers, laser sensors, and other surface or subsurface sensors;
• experiences of integrated monitoring of infrastructures on various spatial and temporal time scales.

Dr. Alberto Refice
Guest Editor

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• Synthetic Aperture Radar Multi-Temporal Interferometry (SAR-MTI)
• InSAR infrastructure monitoring
• InSAR / GPS/ ground sensor integration
• InSAR atmospheric effects estimation/reduction
• MTI Time series classification