WORKABLE MONITORING SYSTEM BASED ON SPACEBORNE SAR IMAGES FOR MINING AREAS - STINGS DEVELOPMENT PROJECT

Abstract

Nowadays monitoring of mining areas, e.g., regarding dam stability, has become increasingly important with rising awareness of safety and environmental protection. An appropriate monitoring scheme is necessitated to legally activate, reactivate, or terminate mining operations. Usually such monitoring relies on in situ surveys, which are unrealistic to cover an extensive mining area. Alternatively, remote sensing based on spaceborne data offers efficient and cost-effective solutions for regular surveillance of large areas. Spaceborne SAR sensors provide images captured rapidly over vast areas at fine spatiotemporal resolution. These sensors are characterized by weather independent and day-and-night vision, which guarantees intensive image series without cloud occlusion. Using multi-temporal SAR images, advanced DInSAR such as PSI and SBAS is a mature technique to evaluate surface deformation at best millimetre level. This technique has been commercialized as a standard service in many Geoinformation companies. Nevertheless, experts from other fields like mining engineers often doubt the information about movement derived from DInSAR. Our duty in industry is to solve these doubts and tailor our techniques for various applications. With the support of STINGS project, we have developed an initial prototype of our monitoring system. The final goal is to launch an interactive GIS-based platform as an early warning system to the public. In this paper, we demonstrate our initial test result using Sentinel-1 images at a mining site in Chile. We also propose the strategies to solve the problems in real applications and discuss how to improve the overall quality.