Simulation assisted high-resolution psi analysis

Abstract

Since the first demonstration of the potential of the differential SAR interferometry in the early 1990s a lot of effort has been made to accurately estimate ground deformation with imaging radar sensors. This led to the invention of the Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI) in the late 1990s. PSI enables the estimation of ground deformation for a set of temporally stable radar reflectors, the so called PS, with millimeter accuracy. The main advantage compared to methods commonly used for ground deformation monitoring like GPS is the possibility to cover large areas very economically. One of the main drawbacks is the opportunistic sampling of the target area, which is mainly governed by the distribution of stable radar reflectors within the scene. Besides problems caused by undersampling the main issue is due to the face, that the real world feature related to a PS is usually not known. This makes the interpretation of the results particularly difficult. While the assignment of these real world features is very difficult in the case of ERS like sensors, modern high resolution SAR sensors like TerraSAR-X (TSX) render this task possible. We investigate the use of SAR simulation to match real world features with PS extracted from a TSX stack acquired over the city of Berlin Germany. The simulation is based on a 3D city model of the area around the Potsdamer Platz, Berlin.