Key technology of D-InSAR at X-band for monitoring land subsidence in mining area and its application

In theory, land subsidence measurement results with high accuracy can be obtained by using the Differential Interferometry Synthetic Aperture Radar (D-InSAR) at X-band. In practice, however, the measuring accuracy of D-InSAR at X-band has been seriously affected by some factors, e.g., decorrelation and high deformation gradient. In this work, the monitoring capability of D-InSAR for coal-mining subsidence is evaluated by using SAR data acquired by TerrraSAR-X system. The SAR image registration method for low coherence image pairs, the denoising phase filter for high noise level interferogram and atmospheric effects mitigation method are the key technical aspects which directly influence the measurement results of D-InSAR at X-band. Thus, a robust image registration method, an improved phase filter method and an atmospheric effects mitigation method are proposed in this paper. The proposed image registration method successfully achieves InSAR coregistration, while the amplitude cross-correlation cannot properly coregister low coherence SAR image pairs. Moreover, the time complexity of the proposed image registration method is obviously slighter than that of the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) method. The comparing experiment results and the unwrapping phase results show that the improved Goldstein filter is more effective than the original Goldstein filter in noise elimination. The atmospheric influence correction experiment results show that the land subsidence areas with atmospheric influence correction are more clarified than that of without atmospheric influence correction. In summary, the presented methods directly improved the measurement results of D-InSAR at X-band.