Infrastructure Stability Analysis by COSMO-SkyMed PSP SAR Interferometry: Spatio-Temporal Analysis and 3D Modeling

Persistent scatterer Interferometry (PSI) is a technique that processes a stack of satellite synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images and measures displacement and 3D position, with millimetric and metric precision respectively in correspondence of sparse points named persistent scatterers (PS). Very dense measurements (e.g., up to tens of thousands of PS per square kilometer with high resolution COSMo-SkyMed SAR data) can be obtained in correspondence of each satellite acquisition date, and over each single infrastructure. This wealth of information is extremely meaningful, but at the same time requires expert knowledge to be converted in a concise description of the underlying phenomena. In this paper, we present a technique that can support end user decisions through automatic information extraction from the PS measurements. The proposed approach is based on: precise location of measurements trough integration with 3D models of the objects under investigation; reconstruction of a model of the displacement integrating measurement from different observation geometries; extraction of statistical indices related to the stability of the infrastructure. The proposed approach appears promising as demonstrated from the results achieved on real COSMO-SkyMed data.