Efficient Ground Surface Displacement Monitoring Using Sentinel-1 Data: Integrating Distributed Scatterers (DS) Identified Using Two-Sample t-Test with Persistent Scatterers (PS)

Abstract

Combining persistent scatterers (PS) and distributed scatterers (DS) is important for effective displacement monitoring using time-series of SAR data. However, for large stacks of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data, the DS analysis using existing algorithms becomes a time-consuming process. Moreover, the whole procedure of DS selection should be repeated as soon as a new SAR acquisition is made, which is challenging considering the short repeat-observation of missions such as Sentinel-1. SqueeSAR is an approach for extracting signals from DS, which first applies a spatiotemporal filter on images and optimizes DS, then incorporates information from both optimized DS and PS points into interferometric SAR (InSAR) time-series analysis. In this study, we followed SqueeSAR and implemented a new approach for DS analysis using two-sample t-test to efficiently identify neighboring pixels with similar behaviour. We evaluated the performance of our approach on 50 Sentinel-1 images acquired over Trondheim in Norway between January 2015 and December 2016. A cross check on the number of the identified neighboring pixels using the Kolmogorov–Smirnov (KS) test, which is employed in the SqueeSAR approach, and the t-test shows that their results are strongly correlated. However, in comparison to KS-test, the t-test is less computationally intensive (98% faster). Moreover, the results obtained by applying the tests under different SAR stack sizes from 40 to 10 show that the t-test is less sensitive to the number of images.