InSAR Monitoring of Regional Infrastructure Networks

Abstract

In western countries, thousands of infrastructure assets have exceeded their intended design life and need continuous monitoring. Space-borne Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radars (InSAR) are capable of wide-area monitoring, providing inexpensive and high-density measurements of buildings and infrastructure deformations with a millimetre-scale accuracy. Infrastructure catalogues can be used to associate the InSAR-based measurements with the corresponding structures. However, when large infrastructure networks are analysed, the manual extraction of the relevant InSAR-derived displacements is not feasible. In this paper, a new methodology based on the automated integration of InSAR-based displacements and infrastructure databases to warn potentially anomalous deformations over large infrastructure networks is presented. The proposed methodology is applied to the Los Angeles highway and freeway network, using Sentinel data from 2016 to 2019. Results can have a direct impact on transportation network management.