Deformation Monitoring Using Ground-Based Differential SAR Tomography

Abstract

This letter presents the first differential synthetic aperture radar (SAR) tomography (D-TomoSAR) results using ground-based SAR (GB-SAR) data sets. GB-SAR provides an important deformation monitoring technology for glacier movements, landslides, and infrastructures because of its real-time monitoring capability compared with the airborne and spaceborne SAR sensors. A D-TomoSAR processing framework using region growing is proposed, which does not require the preliminary removal of atmospheric phase screen. The most reliable single-scatterers are identified as seeds, whereas the double-scatterers and unstable single-scatterers are resolved iteratively using region growing. First experimental results on 89 GB-SAR images over the Aletsch glacier, Switzerland, demonstrate the effectiveness of GB D-TomoSAR and the proposed method.