A novel geo-statistical approach for transport infrastructure network monitoring by Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI)

Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI) is an Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) remote sensing technique based on a multi-temporal interferogram analysis of SAR images. The aim of the technique is to extract long-term high phase stability benchmarks of coherent point targets, namely Persistent Scatterers (PSs). In the last few years, several approaches have been developed to obtain PSI point targets, proving their viability for applications to transport infrastructure monitoring and surveillance. However, SAR satellites can only detect displacements in the Line-of-Sight (LoS), with reference to the specific orbit-related incident angle. This work proposes a novel geo-statistical approach to ease the post-processing of large datasets of PSs resulting from the application of the PSI algorithms over an area of interest. The approach aims at correcting the component of the displacement collected from the acquisition geometry of the sensor.