Monitoring Ground Displacement in Mining Areas with Time-Series Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar by Integrating Persistent Scatterer/Slowly Decoherent Filtering Phase/Distributed Scatterer Approaches Based on Signal-to-Noise Ratio

Abstract

During the interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR)-based ground displacement monitoring in mining areas, the overlying land is mainly covered by low vegetation and arable land, which makes interferograms acquired by InSAR techniques easily susceptible to decorrelation, resulting in the quantity and density of highly coherent points (CPs) are not enough to reflect the spatial location and spatio-temporal evolution process of ground displacement, which is hardly meeting requirements of high-precision ground displacement monitoring. In this study, we developed an approach for monitoring ground displacement in mining areas by integrating Persistent Scatterer (PS), Slowly Decoherent Filtering Phase (SDF), and Distributed Scatterer (DS) based on signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to increase the spatial density of CPs. A case study based on a mining area in Heze was carried out to verify the reliability and feasibility of the proposed method in practical applications. Results showed that there were four significant displacement areas in the study area and the quantity of CPs acquired by the proposed method was maximum 6.7 times that of conventional PS-InSAR technique and maximum 2.3 times that of SBAS-InSAR technique. The density of CPs acquired by the proposed method increased significantly. The acquired ground displacement information of the study area was presented in more detail. Moreover, the monitoring results were highly consistent with ground displacement results extracted by PS-InSAR and SBAS-InSAR methods in terms of displacement trends and magnitudes.