Short Baseline TerraSAR-X PSI for Monitoring Subsidence of Highways and Railways, Case Study with Corner Reflectors

Abstract. Ground subsidence is one of the key factors causing damages to transportation facilities, e.g., transportation network (TN) consists of highways and railways. For better exploration of TN subsidence, we propose to use the high resolution TerraSAR-X (TSX) persistent scatterer interferometry (PSI) approach to extract regional scale (RS) subsidence related to the TN. The primary procedures involve interferometric pair selection, interferogram generation, persistent scatterer (PS) detection, PS networking, phase parameterization and subsidence estimation. Xiqing district of southwest Tianjin (China) is selected as the study area, in which multiple highways and one railway line are located. 15 TSX images collected over this area between March, 2009 and June, 2010 are utilized to extract subsidence by the TSX PSI approach. The subsidence rate (SR) map shows that remarkably uneven subsidence occurs along and around the TN, and the SR ranges between –69 and –1.3 mm/yr. For validation purpose, the SR of the TN derived by PSI is compared with leveling data collected for the benchmarks deployed along the selected highways. The mean and root mean square error (RMSE) of discrepancies between two data sets are 0.1 and ±3.2 mm/yr, respectively. The numerical analysis indicates that the high resolution TSX PSI is able to reveal comprehensive and detailed subsidence related to the TN with a millimeter level accuracy.