Extension of PS-InSAR Approach for DEM and Linear Deformation Rates Estimation. Case Study of Bucharest Area

Persistent Scatterers interferometry represented a breakthrough in synthetic aperture radar processing, its initial approach covering the linear deformation rates estimation step. Most advanced differential interferometric methods prefer the use of an external digital elevation model, because of the difficulties of unwrapping an interferometric phase which contains also the topographic component. In this work, the persistent scatterers approach is extended also for digital elevation model estimation, by applying the minimum cost flow phase unwrapping algorithm solely on the detected PS network. A detailed presentation of the proposed processing chain is conducted, along with the results of the described algorithm's implementation on a test region from Bucharest city, using a dataset of 12 Sentinel-1 acquisitions.