Retrieving 3-D Large Displacements of Mining Areas from a Single Amplitude Pair of SAR Using Offset Tracking

Due to the side-looking imaging geometry of the current synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensors, only ground deformation along the radar’s line-of-sight (LOS) and azimuth directions can be potentially obtained from a single amplitude pair (SAP) of SAR using offset tracking (OT) procedures. This significantly hinders the accurate assessment of mining-related hazards and better understanding of the mining subsidence mechanism. In this paper, we propose a method for completely retrieving three-dimensional (3-D) mining-induced displacements with OT-derived observations of LOS deformation from a single amplitude pair of SAR (referred to as OT-SAP hereinafter). The OT-SAP method first constructs two extra constraints at each pixel of the mining area based on the proportional relationship between the horizontal motion of the mining area and the gradients of the vertical subsidence in the east and north directions. The full 3-D mining-induced displacements are then solved by coupling the two constructed extra constraints with the OT-derived observations of the LOS deformation. The Daliuta coal mining area in China was selected to test the proposed OT-SAP method. The results show that the maximum 3-D displacements of this mining area were about 4.3 m, 1.1 m, and 1.3 m in the vertical, east, and north directions, respectively, from 21 November 2012 to 6 February 2013. The accuracies of the retrieved displacements in the vertical and horizontal directions are about 0.201 m and 0.214 m, respectively, which are much smaller than the mining-induced displacements in this mining area and can satisfy the basic requirements of mining deformation monitoring.