An improved method of GB-SAR phase unwrapping for landslide monitoring

Abstract

The ground-based Synthetic Aperture Radar (GB-SAR) technique can be applied to the safety monitoring and early warning of geo-hazards, especially for monitoring displacement of various types of landslide masses. One of the key techniques of processing GB-SAR monitoring data is phase unwrapping, which can be dramatically affected by atmospheric humidity, atmospheric pressure, sampling interval, etc. In high mountains and valleys where environmental change is drastic, GB-SAR monitoring data is vulnerable to incoherence both spatially and temporally. Therefore, an improved phase unwrapping method of GB-SAR data for landslide monitoring is proposed in this paper, which can realize three-dimensional phase unwrapping in time and space. The method adopts the idea of sparse data processing and realizes phase unwrapping of monitoring data in two steps. Firstly, taking full advantage of the high temporal resolution of GB-SAR monitoring data, the one-dimensional phase unwrapping method in the spatial domain is applied to the time domain, and the interference phases of PS points are unwrapped in the time domain. Then, the PS network is constructed based on the time-phase unwrapping results, the double-difference phases of the network baselines are obtained and the spatial consistency adjustment is applied to them, and the spatial phase unwrapping can be realized by the indirect least square adjustment method. This method successfully solves the problem of path dependence, island isolation and large computation of the common method of space-borne SAR phase unwrapping, which can process GB-SAR data with high accuracy and efficiency.