Landslide Detection Based on Multi-Direction Phase Gradient Stacking, with Application to Zhouqu, China

Abstract

Landslides are a common geological disaster, which cause many economic losses and casualties in the world each year. Drawing up a landslide list and monitoring their deformations is crucial to prevent landslide disasters. Interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) can obtain millimeter-level surface deformations and provide data support for landslide deformation monitoring. However, some landslides are difficult to detect due to the low-coherence caused by vegetation cover in mountainous areas and the difficulty of phase unwrapping caused by large landslide deformations. In this paper, a method based on multi-direction phase gradient stacking is proposed. It employs the differential interferograms of small baseline sets to directly obtain the abnormal region, thereby avoiding the problem where part of landslide cannot be detected due to a phase unwrapping error. In this study, the Sentinel-1 satellite ascending and descending data from 2018 to 2020 are used to detect landslides around Zhouqu County, China. A total of 26 active landslides were detected in ascending data and 32 active landslides in the descending data using the method in this paper, while the SBAS-InSAR detected 19 active landslides in the ascending data and 25 active landslides in the descending data. The method in this paper can successfully detect landslides in areas that are difficult for the SBAS-InSAR to detect. In addition, the proposed method does not require phase unwrapping, so a significant amount of data processing time can be saved.