Remote Monitoring of Civil Infrastructure Based on TomoSAR

• Published in: Infrastructures (Basel) Vol. 7; no. 4; p. 52
• Main Authors: Budillon, Alessandra, Schirinzi, Gilda
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 06-04-2022
• Subjects: Accuracy; civil infrastructure monitoring; Damage detection; Deformation; Dilation; Earthquakes; False alarms; generalized likelihood ratio test; Infrastructure; Inspection; Noise; Remote monitoring; Remote sensing; Remote sensing systems; SAR; Sensors; Structural health monitoring; structure health monitoring; Superhigh frequencies; Synthetic aperture radar; tomography; Urban areas; Urban planning; Visual observation
• ISSN: 2412-3811; 2412-3811
• DOI: 10.3390/infrastructures7040052

Structural health monitoring and damage detection tools are extremely important topics nowadays with the civil infrastructure aging and deteriorating problems observed in urban areas. These tasks can be done by visual inspection and by using traditional in situ methods, such as leveling or using traditional mechanical and electrical sensors, but these approaches are costly, labor-intensive and cannot be performed with a high temporal frequency. In recent years, remote sensing has proved to be a very promising methodology in evaluating the health of a structure by assessing its deformation and thermal dilation. The satellite-based Synthetic Aperture Radar Tomography (TomoSAR) technique, based on the exploitation of a stack of multi-temporal SAR images, allows to remotely sense the movement and the thermal dilation of individual structures with a centimeter- to millimeter-level accuracy, thanks to new generation high-resolution satellite-borne sensors. In this paper, the effectiveness of a recently developed TomoSAR technique in assessing both possible deformations and the thermal dilation evolution of man-made structures is shown. The results obtained using X-band SAR data in two case studies, concerning two urban structures in the city of Naples (Italy), are presented.