Polarimetric SAR pixel offset tracking for large-gradient landslide displacement mapping

Abstract

Interferometry and pixel offset tracking (POT) are two major technologies to measure ground deformation with repeat-pass synthetic aperture radar (SAR) observations. The SAR POT method can tolerate a much larger deformation gradient than interferometric SAR (InSAR), and thus it has been widely applied in monitoring earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, glaciers, etc. However, there is an intrinsic trade-off between matching accuracy and detail preserving in terms of matching window size for the traditional SAR POT method using only single-polarization intensity. Taking advantage of polarimetric scattering properties, this study develops a novel POT method, named PCM-POT, towards mitigating the dependence of offset estimations on matching window size. It employs a generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) upon polarimetric covariance matrices (PCMs) to evaluate the similarity of two candidate pixels and estimate high-resolution surface displacements with high accuracy. The effectiveness and advantage of PCM-POT are demonstrated by an experiment of retrieving the displacements of the Slumgullion landslide from a pair of full-polarimetric UAVSAR images. Comparisons with the traditional POT indicate that using polarimetric scattering properties can reduce the uncertainty in offset estimations over heterogeneous sliding areas. Further experiments suggest that PCM-POT is also suitable for dual-polarimetric satellite SAR data.