A Method for Observing Seismic Ground Deformation from Airborne SAR Images

Observation of seismic ground deformation is one of the fundamental topics in remote sensing. A Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has been used to obtain images representing geometrical properties of the ground surface. SAR images can be taken in nearly all weather conditions and in nearly all time. This paper proposes a ground deformation observation method using image correspondence matching, which employs phase-only correlation to estimate displacement between two SAR intensity images with sub-pixel accuracy. Through experiments using airborne SAR intensity images of the Kumamoto Earthquake, we demonstrate that the proposed method exhibits the efficient performance in observing seismic ground deformation.