Performance Assessment Metrics for Line-Infrastructure Monitoring with Multi-Sensor SAR Data

Abstract

Satellite radar interferometry (InSAR) has been used to monitor the structural health of line-infrastructure (e.g. railways, bridges, dams and dikes) in recent years. This enables the retrieval of millimeter-level changes in the line-infrastructure geometry on a bi-weekly basis. However, InSAR is an opportunistic method for which the location of the measurements (coherent scatterers) cannot be guaranteed, and the quality of the InSAR products vary from one case to another. Particularly, this is due to the orientation of the line-infrastructure relative to the satellite position, and its expected deformation magnitude and direction. Hence, the InSAR applicability and performance quality is not uniform. In operational situations, this tends to make asset managers skeptical about the potential of InSAR application on these assets. In this work, following [1] we develop new standard InSAR products for line-infrastructure monitoring, provide tools for predicting optimal multi-sensor SAR data combinations, and propose generic a priori performance assessment metrics for line-infrastructure. These products and metrics are tested on the Dutch railway line-infrastructure asset.