An advanced InSAR algorithm for surface deformation monitoring: SqueeSARTM

Permanent Scatterer SAR Interferometry (PSInSAR) algorithm identifies coherent radar targets (PS) to detect and monitor surface deformation phenomena. PS typically correspond to point-wise, man-made objects widely available in urban areas. Sometimes, however, it is difficult to apply this technology for un-urban areas, due to a much lower spatial density of PS. To overcome the limit of PSInSAR and increase the spatial density of measurement points in un-urban areas, a new algorithm for processing interferometric data-stacks has been developed. It can measure the surface deformation not only from point-wise deterministic objects (i.e., PS), but also from distributed scatterers (DS) corresponding to areas of homogeneous pixels exhibiting good phase coherence in a subset of interferograms. In this paper we introduce a new approach, SqueeSARTM, to jointly process PS and DS, taking into account their different statistical behavior.