An On-Site InSAR Terrain Imaging Method with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.

Area of Science:

• Geodesy
• Remote Sensing
• Geospatial Analysis

Background:

• Terrain monitoring is crucial for disaster management and infrastructure development.
• Traditional methods often lack the flexibility and real-time capabilities needed for dynamic environments.
• High-resolution, rapid terrain change detection is essential for effective land management.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose and validate an on-site InSAR imaging method using UAVs for high-resolution terrain change monitoring.
• To demonstrate the real-time surveying and exploration capabilities of the proposed method.
• To assess the method's efficacy and computational efficiency against existing techniques.

Main Methods:

• Utilizing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for on-site Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) data acquisition.
• Implementing a least-square phase unwrapping technique for accurate phase correction.
• Applying a mean filter for speckle reduction to enhance terrain profile reconstruction.

Main Results:

• The proposed UAV-based InSAR method successfully reconstructs terrain profiles with high spatial resolution.
• Simulations based on USGS 3DEP datasets validate the method's efficacy across diverse scenarios.
• The technique demonstrates competitive CPU time efficiency compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Conclusions:

• The UAV-based on-site InSAR imaging method provides a flexible and efficient solution for real-time terrain monitoring.
• The combination of phase unwrapping and speckle filtering is effective for accurate terrain reconstruction.
• This approach offers significant advantages for applications requiring rapid and detailed land surface change detection.