Detection of Building and Infrastructure Instabilities by Automatic Spatiotemporal Analysis of Satellite SAR Interferometry Measurements

Abstract

Satellite synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometry (InSAR) is a powerful technology to monitor slow ground surface movements. However, the extraction and interpretation of information from big sets of InSAR measurements is a complex and demanding task. In this paper, a new method is presented for automatically detecting potential instability risks affecting buildings and infrastructures, by searching for anomalies in the persistent scatterer (PS) deformations, either in the spatial or in the temporal dimensions. In the spatial dimension, in order to reduce the dataset size and improve data reliability, we utilize a hierarchical clustering method to obtain convergence points that are more trustworthy. Then, we detect deformations characterized by large values and spatial inhomogeneity. In the temporal dimension, we use a signal processing method to decompose the input into two main components: regular periodic deformations and piecewise linear deformations. After removing the periodic component, the velocity variation in each identified temporal partition is analyzed to detect anomalous velocity trends and accelerations. The method has been tested on different sites in China, based on InSAR measurements from COSMO-SkyMed data. The results, verified with in-field surveys, confirm the potential of the method for the automatic detection of deformation anomalies that could cause building or infrastructure stability problems.

Investigation of the Ground Motion Near the Leaning Tower of Bad Frankenhausen Using Sentinel-1 Persistent Scatterer Interferometry

“…Usually built on different fundaments as their surroundings, such infrastructures often present particular deformation patterns in comparison to their direct neighbourhood. Approaches for the automatic detection of such irregular patterns in space and time have been developed already (Zhu et al, 2018), few also considering the interaction between geology and observed subsidence (Pratesi et el., 2016;North et al, 2017). While some approaches rely principally on the velocity estimates for clustering (Kalia, 2018;Aslan, 2020), other approaches consider the time series of the displacements for identifying different deformation regimes (Zhu et al, 2018).…”

Monitoring the Impact of Groundwater Pumping on Infrastructure Using Geographic Information System (GIS) and Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI)

“…While monitoring of individual infrastructure is critical, the regional-scale monitoring of infrastructure is hypercritical for land use planning and sustainable development. Studies have shown the application of satellite-based Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) for monitoring bridges and critical infrastructure as well as regional-scale displacement from tectonics and other processes [8][9][10][11][12]. This study builds on those efforts to demonstrate how InSAR based (particularly Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI)) monitoring and Geographic Information System (GIS) based analysis can be helpful to understand the performance of an individual infrastructure as well as evaluate whether regional scale processes control these performances.…”

Comment on “Pre-Collapse Space Geodetic Observations of Critical Infrastructure: The Morandi Bridge, Genoa, Italy” by Milillo et al. (2019)

“…In particular, in the presented study, we reprocessed the overall ascending and descending CSK dataset analyzed in [2] by exploiting two independent SAR processing techniques: the Small BAseline Subset (SBAS) [5][6][7] and the Advanced Tomographic SAR (TomoSAR) [8,9] approaches, respectively. These two methods are nowadays well-established tools for the investigation of the temporal evolution of displacements affecting buildings and infrastructures [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20].…”