Improving the Robustness of the MTI-Estimated Mining-Induced 3D Time-Series Displacements with a Logistic Model

Abstract

The previous multi-track InSAR (MTI) method can be used to retrieve mining-induced three-dimensional (3D) surface displacements with high spatial–temporal resolution by incorporating multi-track interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) observations with a prior model. However, due to the track-by-track strategy used in the previous MTI method, no redundant observations are provided to estimate 3D displacements, causing poor robustness and further degrading the accuracy of the 3D displacement estimation. This study presents an improved MTI method to significantly improve the robustness of the 3D mining displacements derived by the previous MTI method. In this new method, a fused-track strategy, instead of the previous track-by-track one, is proposed to process the multi-track InSAR measurements by introducing a logistic model. In doing so, redundant observations are generated and further incorporated into the prior model to solve 3D displacements. The improved MTI method was tested on the Datong coal mining area, China, with Sentinel-1 InSAR datasets from three tracks. The results show that the 3D mining displacements estimated by the improved MTI method had the same spatial–temporal resolution as those estimated by the previous MTI method and about 33.5% better accuracy. The more accurate 3D displacements retrieved from the improved MTI method can offer better data for scientifically understanding the mechanism of mining deformation and assessing mining-related geohazards.