On the influence of sub-pixel position correction for PS localization accuracy and time series quality

Journal Article (2020)
Author(s)

M. Yang (TU Delft - Mathematical Geodesy and Positioning, Wuhan University)

P Dheenathayalan (TU Delft - Mathematical Geodesy and Positioning)

Francisco Dekker (TU Delft - Mathematical Geodesy and Positioning)

Freek Van Leijen (TU Delft - Mathematical Geodesy and Positioning)

Mingsheng Liao (Wuhan University)

Ramon Hanssen (TU Delft - Mathematical Geodesy and Positioning)

Research Group
Mathematical Geodesy and Positioning
Copyright
© 2020 M. Yang, P. Dheenathayalan, F.J. Lopez Dekker, F.J. van Leijen, Mingsheng Liao, R.F. Hanssen
DOI related publication
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isprsjprs.2020.04.023
More Info
expand_more
Publication Year
2020
Language
English
Copyright
© 2020 M. Yang, P. Dheenathayalan, F.J. Lopez Dekker, F.J. van Leijen, Mingsheng Liao, R.F. Hanssen
Research Group
Mathematical Geodesy and Positioning
Volume number
165
Pages (from-to)
98-107
Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

Abstract

Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI) is a time series remote sensing technique to estimate displacements of geo-objects from the interferometric phases of selected Persistent Scatterers (PS). The relative position of a scatterer within a resolution cell causes an additional phase contribution in the observed phase, which needs to be accounted for in PSI processing. Here we analyze the influence of this sub-pixel position correction on point localization and displacement quality. Apart from a theoretical evaluation, we perform experiments with TerraSAR-X, Radarsat-2, and Sentinel-1, demonstrating various levels of improvement. We show that the influence of the sub-pixel correction is significant for the geolocation of the scatterer (meter-level improvement), modest for the elevation estimation (centimeter-level improvement), and limited for the displacement estimation (submillimeter-level). For displacement velocities, we find variations of a few tenths of a millimeter per year. The effect of sub-pixel correction is most dominant for large orbital baselines and short time series.