Complex Urban Infrastructure Deformation Monitoring Using High Resolution PSI

The rising concern on the urban vulnerability to the intensive infrastructure development requires enabling technologies offering a prompt and accurate monitoring of urban infrastructures deformation. Urban infrastructures vary dramatically both spatially and temporally and their deformation characteristics are complex. We evaluated the potential of high resolution Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI) technology using coherent stacks of Spotlight mode TerraSAR-X images in monitoring the deformations of different types of infrastructures in a new economics center in China. The high density of Persistent Scatterers (PSs) was identified and therefore facilitates analyzing the deformation character of individual structures. All PSs weer categorized by identifying their corresponding ground object so as to enable to characterize deformation pattern of certain type of urban infrastructure. The spatial and temporal varying patterns of the deformations of typical building infrastructures and transportation infrastructures are revealed. They are strongly related to the interactive effects between the types, engineering structures, geometries, engineering geological settings and various loading scenarios. Besides subsidence of the ground surface, thermal dilation of the infrastructure itself might be another factor accounting for the observed deformation of infrastructure. Although the interpretation for the observed deformation patterns could be quite site-specific, high resolution PSI is shown to have the potential to reveal detailed deformation characteristics of complex urban infrastructures at a relatively large scale.