Assessment of the Contribution of Polarimetric Persistent Scatterer Interferometry on Sentinel-1 Data

Abstract

Time series of Sentinel-1 data are widely used for monitoring displacements of the Earth surface using persistent scatterer interferometry. By default over land, Sentinel-1 images include two polarimetric channels: VV and VH. However, most works in this application exploit only the VV channel, whereas the VH channel is discarded for its lower amplitude. Thanks to the development of polarimetric persistent scatterer interferometry methods, one can integrate multi-polarisation channels into a single optimal one. Previous studies proved that the number and spatial density of measurement points is increased. In this work, we explore the reason why the VH channel increases the number of measurement points when using the amplitude dispersion ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$D_{A}$</tex-math></inline-formula> ) as selection criterion. Results obtained over three geographical locations show that the VH channel helps in two ways. In first place, the mean amplitude is increased for targets which have higher amplitude in VH channel, usually associated with rotated elements in the scene. In second place, and more importantly, the amplitude dispersion is decreased over many areas for which the VV channel exhibits fluctuations and peaks. Thanks to the insensitivity of the VH channel to these scene changes, it provides additional measurement points which are reliable despite their low amplitude. The increment of measurement points not only extends the spatial density and enables the detection of active deformation areas not found in the VV results, but also provides more accurate results than only using the VV channel, thanks to the increased density of points, which helps the deformation estimation.