Bayesian Estimation of Land Deformation Combining Persistent and Distributed Scatterers

Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI) has been widely used for monitoring land deformation in urban areas with millimeter accuracy. In natural terrain, combining persistent scatterers (PSs) and distributed scatterers (DSs) to jointly estimate deformation, such as SqueeSAR, can enhance PSI results for denser and better coverage. However, the phase quality of a large number of DSs is far inferior to that of PSs, which deteriorates the deformation measurement accuracy. To solve the contradiction between measurement accuracy and coverage, a Bayesian estimation method of land deformation combining PSs and DSs is proposed in this paper. First, a two-level network is introduced into the traditional PSI to deal with PSs and DSs. In the first-level network, the Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) of deformation parameters at PSs and high-quality DSs is obtained accurately. In the secondary-level network, the remaining DSs are connected to the nearest PSs or high-quality DSs, and the deformation parameters are estimated by Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) based on Bayesian theory. Due to the poor phase quality of the remaining DSs, MAP can achieve better estimation results than the MLE based on the spatial correlation of the deformation field. Simulation and Sentinel-1A satellite data results verified the feasibility and reliability of the proposed method. Regularized by the spatial deformation field derived from the high-quality PSs and DSs, the proposed method is expected to achieve robust results even in low-coherence areas, such as rural areas, vegetation coverage areas, or deserts.