Estimating Strain and Rotation From Wrapped SAR Interferograms

• Published in: IEEE geoscience and remote sensing letters Vol. 15; no. 9; pp. 1367 - 1371
• Main Authors: Parizzi, Alessandro, Abdel Jaber, Wael
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 01-09-2018; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Components; Differential synthetic aperture radar interferometry (DInSAR); Estimation; Frameworks; Frequency estimation; Geometry; Glacier flow; Glaciers; glaciers flow; gradient tensor; Interferometry; Parallel flow; Radar; Rotation; SAR (radar); Strain; Synthetic aperture radar; Synthetic aperture radar interferometry; Tensile stress
• ISSN: 1545-598X; 1558-0571
• DOI: 10.1109/LGRS.2018.2838763

This letter aims to discuss a general framework that allows the direct interpretation of the wrapped differential synthetic aperture radar interferometry phase in terms of surface strain <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">S </tex-math></inline-formula> and rotation <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">R </tex-math></inline-formula> components. The methodology is demonstrated showing the estimation of strain and rotation components of a glacier flow using three TerraSAR-X interferometric geometries (ascending right-looking, descending right-looking, and descending left-looking). Finally, since the left-looking geometry can be difficult to obtain on a regular basis, the surface parallel flow assumption is extended to the phase gradients inversion in order to reduce the amount of necessary geometries from three to two.