Detecting ground deformation with permanent-scatterer network in radar interferometry: Algorithm and testing results

To mitigate the negative influences of both spatio-temporal decorrelation and atmospheric delay in the conventional synthetic aperture radar differential interferometry (DInSAR), this paper explores and develops a permanent-scatterer (PS) networking algorithm and a set of computer programs. Both models and robust parameter-estimation strategy are presented. This method can be utilized to separate and extract the linear and nonlinear time series deformations, topographic errors and atmospheric signals. Taking the subsidence field of Shanghai as the study area, the experiments of deformation analysis by PS-DInSAR are finally performed using the simulated data and the 26 SAR scenes taken by ERS-1/2 from 1992 to 2002. The testing results show that the PS-networking method is effective and reliable.