Reducing the Residual Topography Phase for the Robust Landscape Deformation Monitoring of Architectural Heritage Sites in Mountain Areas: The Pseudo-Combination SBAS Method

Abstract

Monitoring deformation of architectural heritage sites is important for the quantitative evaluation of their stability. However, deformation monitoring of sites in mountainous areas remains challenging whether utilizing global navigation satellite system (GNSS) or interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) techniques. In this study, we improved the small baseline subset (SBAS) approach by introducing the pseudo-baseline combination strategy to avoid the errors caused by inaccurate external DEM, resulting in robust deformation estimations in mountainous areas where the architectural heritage site of the Great Wall is located. First, a simulated dataset and a real dataset were used to verify the reliability and effectiveness of the algorithm, respectively. Subsequently, the algorithm was applied in the landscape deformation monitoring of the Shanhaiguan section of the Great Wall using 51 Sentinel-1 scenes acquired from 2016 to 2018. A thematic stability map of the Shanhaiguan Great Wall corridor was generated, revealing that the landscape was generally stable save for local instabilities due to to unstable rocks and wall monuments. This study demonstrated the capabilities of adaptive multitemporal InSAR (MTInSAR) approaches in the preventive landscape deformation monitoring of large-scale architectural heritage sites in complex terrain.

Temporal and Spatial Analysis of Deformation Monitoring of the Ming Great Wall in Shanxi Province through InSAR

“…Chen et al, on the other hand, conducted the surface deformation monitoring of the ancient pagodas in Bagan, Myanmar, using SBAS-InSAR and PS-InSAR technologies [41]. Additionally, Xu et al proposed a specialized algorithm suitable for complex terrains in mountainous areas to monitor surface deformation of the Shanhaiguan section of the Ming Great Wall in Hebei Province and produced a stability risk map for this section [42]. Building upon the studies conducted by scholars both domestically and internationally, this research combines Sentinel-1A ascending orbit data with the SBAS-InSAR technique to obtain a deformation velocity field of the Great Wall corridor in Shanxi.…”