InSAR Displacement Time Series Mining: A Machine Learning Approach

• Published in: 2021 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium IGARSS pp. 3301 - 3304
• Main Authors: Ansari, Homa, Rubwurm, Marc, Ali, Mohsin, Montazeri, Sina, Parizzi, Alessandro, Zhu, Xiao Xiang
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 11-07-2021
• Subjects: Autoencoders; Clustering; Data mining; Deep Learning; InSAR; Latent Representation Learning; Machine learning; Manifolds; Sequence Models; Signal reconstruction; Systematics; Time Series; Time series analysis; Uncertainty; Unsupervised Learning
• DOI: 10.1109/IGARSS47720.2021.9553465
• EISSN: 2153-7003

Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR)-derived surface displacement time series enable a wide range of applications from urban structural monitoring to geohazard assessment. With systematic data acquisitions becoming the new norm for SAR missions, millions of time series are continuously generated. Machine Learning provides a framework for the efficient mining of such big data. Here, we focus on unsupervised mining of the data via clustering the similar temporal patterns and data-driven displacement signal reconstruction from the InSAR time series. We propose a deep Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) autoencoder model which can exploit temporal relations in contrast to the commonly used shallow learning methods, such as Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP). We also modify the loss function to allow the quantification of uncertainties in the time series data. The two approaches are applied to the Lazufre Volcanic Complex located at the central volcanic zone of the Andes and thereby compared.