Detecting land subsidence near metro lines in the Baoshan district of Shanghai with multi-temporal interferometric synthetic aperture radar

Land subsidence is a major factor that affects metro line (ML) stability. In this study, an improved multi-temporal interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) (MTI) method to detect land subsidence near MLs is presented. In particular, our multi-temporal InSAR method provides surface subsidence measurements with high observation density. The MTI method tracks both point-like targets and distributed targets with temporal radar backscattering steadiness. First, subsidence rates at the point targets with low-amplitude dispersion index (ADI) values are extracted by applying a least-squared estimator on an optimized freely connected network. Second, to reduce error propagation, the pixels with high-ADI values are classified into several groups according to ADI intervals and processed using a Pearson correlation coefficient and hierarchical analysis strategy to obtain the distributed targets. Then, nonlinear subsidence components at all point-like and distributed targets are estimated using phase unwrapping and spatiotemporal filtering on the phase residuals. The proposed MTI method was applied to detect land subsidence near MLs of No. 1 and 3 in the Baoshan district of Shanghai using 18 TerraSAR-X images acquired between April 21, 2008 and October 30, 2010. The results show that the mean subsidence rates of the stations distributed along the two MLs are −12.9 and −14.0 mm/year. Furthermore, three subsidence funnels near the MLs are discovered through the hierarchical analysis. The testing results demonstrate the satisfactory capacity of the proposed MTI method in providing detailed subsidence information near MLs. © 2014, The Author(s).