Identifying limitations of Permanent Scatterers Interferometry for buildings monitoring

Abstract

. The Permanent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI) represents one of the most advanced monitoring techniques from space. In the current paper, the technique is applied for observing the movement behaviors of buildings found in the center of Romania’s capital, Bucharest, in order to verify whether there is a possibility to differentiate among patterns. The main hypothesis of the research is that buildings respond to ground movement differently depending on their characteristics, such as age, construction material, and structure or height regime. Twenty-seven images acquired by the German TerraSAR-X (TSX) satellite, were processed in order to depict ground level deformations. The buildings were analyzed by classifying them in different categories, depending on their earthquake vulnerability, height and location. The results suggested that the movement patterns identified by the satellite depend mainly on the spatial distribution of the buildings.

Keywords

• Permanent Scatterer Interferometry
• Urban monitoring
• TerraSAR-X
• InSAR