Monitoring Line-Infrastructure With Multisensor SAR Interferometry: Products and Performance Assessment Metrics

Satellite radar interferometry (InSAR) is an emerging technique to monitor the stability and health of line-infrastructure assets, such as railways, dams, and pipelines. However, InSAR is an opportunistic approach as the location and occurrence of its measurements (coherent scatterers) cannot be guaranteed, and the quality of the InSAR products is not uniform. This is a problem for operational asset managers, who are used to surveying techniques that provide results with uniform quality at predefined locations. Therefore, advanced integrated products and generic performance assessment metrics are necessary. Here, we propose several new monitoring products and quality metrics for a-priori and a-posteriori performance assessment using multisensor InSAR. These products and metrics are demonstrated on a 125 km railway line-infrastructure asset in the Netherlands.