Temporal consolidation strategy for ground based image displacement time series : application to glacier monitoring

In this article, we present a method for combining image-based displacements to build time series. This method takes advantage of the redundancy of these displacements, which comes from multiple possible combinations between images. The proposed method combines common master series with a different master date to construct a single time series of relative displacements. We were able to test this method on displacements computed using images from a stereo time-lapse device recording images of the Argentiere glacier during the summer and fall of 2019. Our method was compared to two other displacement aggregation strategies: a simple common master approach and the classical inversion method. In order to perform this comparison, displacement data from four permanent GPS are used. The results show that our method provides a more accurate time series of relative displacements than those obtained with the other methods. The higher accuracy of the proposed method makes the detection of seasonal variations in glacier velocity possible.