Ground settlement monitoring from temporarily persistent scatterers between two SAR acquisitions

We present an improved differential interferometric synthetic aperture radar (DInSAR) analysis method that measures motions of scatterers whose phases are stable between two SAR acquisitions. Such scatterers are referred to as temporarily persistent scatterers (TPS) for simplicity. Unlike the persistent scatterer InSAR (PS-InSAR) method that relies on a time-series of interferograms, the new algorithm needs only one interferogram. TPS are identified based on pixel offsets between two SAR images, and are specially coregistered based on their estimated offsets instead of a global polynomial for the whole image. Phase unwrapping is carried out based on an algorithm for sparse data points. The method is successfully applied to measure the settlement in the Hong Kong Airport area. The buildings surrounded by vegetation were successfully selected as TPS and the tiny deformation signal over the area was detected.