Persistent scatterers detection on synthetic aperture radar images acquired by Sentinel-1 satellite

Abstract

Persistent Scatterers Interferometry (PS-InSAR) has become a popular method in remote sensing because of its capability to measure terrain deformations with very high accuracy. It relies on multiple Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) acquisitions, to monitor points with stable proprieties over time, called Persistent Scatterers (PS)[1]. These points are unaffected by temporal decorrelation, therefore by analyzing their interferometric phase variation we can estimate the scene’s deformation rates within a given time interval. In this work, we apply two incoherent detection algorithms to identify Persistent Scatterers candidates in the city of Focșani, Romania. The first method studies the variation of targets’ intensities along the SAR acquisitions and the second method analyzes the spectral proprieties of the scatterers. The algorithms were implemented on a dataset containing 11 complex images of the region covering Buzau, Braila and Focșani cities. Images were acquired by Sentinel-1 satellite in a time span of 5 months, from October 2014 to February 2015. The processing chain follows the requirements imposed by the new C-band SAR images delivered by the Sentinel-1 satellite (launched in April 2014) imaging in Interferometric Wide (IW) mode. Considering the particularities of the TOPS (Terrain Observation with Progressive Scans in Azimuth) imaging mode[2], special requirements had to be considered for pre-processing steps. The PS detection algorithms were implemented in Gamma RS program, a software which contains various function packages dedicated to SAR images focalization, analysis and processing.