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Microwave Remote Sensing and Applications: New Challenges of the Earth Observation (EO) Technology for the Building of a More Resilient Society to Natural Disasters

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A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Remote Sensors".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (28 December 2021) | Viewed by 13271

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Dr. Antonio Pepe

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Guest Editor

IREA-CNR, 80124 Napoli, Italy
Interests: geodesy; deformation; InSAR; phase unwrapping; SBAS; synthetic aperture RADAR interferometry techniques; multi-track; satellite constellations
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The exploitation of Earth Observation (EO) methodologies, based on the use of instruments operating at the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum, presently represents a common practice in the scientific community. The development of new remote sensing techniques as well as the consolidation of the well-established ones is currently favored by the increasing amount of EO data collected by several sensors mounted onboard to space and/or aerial vectors that have been emerging over recent years. New added-value products, based on the processing of such large amount of data by means of innovative high-computing paradigms, are expected to be put in place to afford the emerging demands of the society, in terms of monitoring and protection of the natural heritage. In this framework, integrated approaches based on the use of radar data at different wavelengths, also potentially complemented with multispectral data collected in the optical/infrared bands, may help in having new information on the state of the Earth’s environment, including the Earth’s surface, the atmosphere, the oceans, and the coastal regions. Among others, the new challenges of the society where EO technologies may give an essential contribution are those connected to the enhancement of the social resilience to natural and human-induced disasters, the detection and prevention of risks conditions for the population, and the study of the atmosphere and ocean current mechanisms.

This Special Issue is open to all researchers. Papers are solicited on the following general themes:

- The exploitation of the existing and planned EO missions to perform extended investigations of the Earth’s environment changes;

- Microwave remote sensing applications: New instruments and acquisition modes;

- Advances of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) technologies, with an emphasis on: (i) the methods for the estimation of the atmospheric disturbances in InSAR interferograms, (ii) the measurement of the soil moisture, (iii) the use of full-pol SAR/InSAR data, and (iv) the coherent change detection;

- The potential of new-generation SAR instruments onboard principal spaceborne platforms: the Sentinel constellation of the European Union, the COSMO-SkyMed constellations of the Italian Space Agency, the ALOS-2 mission of the Japanese Space Agency, the TerraSAR-X constellation operated by DLR, and the Argentinian SAOCOM sensor’s constellation;

- High Performance Computing (HPC) InSAR/SAR data processing;

- Study of the Earth’s atmosphere and the ocean’s currents;

- Study of the climate change and the sea-level-rise in coastal regions;

- Exploitation of EO data for the building of a more resilient society to natural and human-induced disasters;

- Geophysical Investigations in areas subjected to natural disasters: the role of current and forthcoming EO missions;

- Integration of information provided through space-, aerial-, and terrestrial-based EO data systems;

- Use of radar instruments for exploration of the Solar system bodies.

Dr. Antonio Pepe
Guest Editor

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Keywords

microwave
synthetic aperture radar
InSAR
space
high-performance computing
cutting-edge technologies
city resilience
atmosphere
ocean
geodesy
new instruments

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Published Papers (4 papers)

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Research

24 pages, 719 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A GPU-Parallel Image Coregistration Algorithm for InSar Processing at the Edge

by Diego Romano and Marco Lapegna

Sensors 2021, 21(17), 5916; https://doi.org/10.3390/s21175916 - 2 Sep 2021

Cited by 9 | Viewed by 2827

Abstract

Image Coregistration for InSAR processing is a time-consuming procedure that is usually processed in batch mode. With the availability of low-energy GPU accelerators, processing at the edge is now a promising perspective. Starting from the individuation of the most computationally intensive kernels from existing algorithms, we decomposed the cross-correlation problem from a multilevel point of view, intending to design and implement an efficient GPU-parallel algorithm for multiple settings, including the edge computing one. We analyzed the accuracy and performance of the proposed algorithm—also considering power efficiency—and its applicability to the identified settings. Results show that a significant speedup of InSAR processing is possible by exploiting GPU computing in different scenarios with no loss of accuracy, also enabling onboard processing using SoC hardware. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Microwave Remote Sensing and Applications: New Challenges of the Earth Observation (EO) Technology for the Building of a More Resilient Society to Natural Disasters)

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19 pages, 7909 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Implementation of Non-Linear Non-Parametric Persistent Scatterer Interferometry and Its Robustness for Displacement Monitoring

by Fumitaka Ogushi, Masashi Matsuoka, Marco Defilippi and Paolo Pasquali

Sensors 2021, 21(3), 1004; https://doi.org/10.3390/s21031004 - 2 Feb 2021

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2753

Abstract

To derive surface displacement, interferometric stacking with synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data is commonly used, and this technique is now in the implementation phase in the real world. Persistent scatterer interferometry (PSI) is one of the most universal approaches among in- terferometric stacking techniques, and non-linear non-parametric PSI (NN-PSI) was proposed to overcome the drawbacks of PSI approaches. The estimation of the non-linear displacements was successfully conducted using NN-PSI. However, the estimation of NN-PSI is not always stable with certain displacements because wider range of the velocity spectrum is used in NN-PSI than the conventional approaches; therefore, a calculation procedure and parameter optimization are needed to consider. In this paper, optimized parameters and procedures of NN-PSI are proposed, and real data processing with Sentinel-1 in the Kanto region in Japan was conducted. We confirmed that the displacement estimation was comparable to the measurement of the permanent global positioning system (GPS) stations, and the root mean square error between the GPS measurement and NN-PSI estimation was less than 3 mm in two years. The displacement over 2

π

ambiguity, which the conventional PSI approach wrongly reconstructed, was also quantitatively validated and successfully estimated by NN-PSI. As a result of the real data processing, periodical displacements were also reconstructed through NN-PSI. We concluded that the NN-PSI approach with the proposed parameters and method enabled the estimation of several types of surface displacements that conventional PSI approaches could not reconstruct. Full article

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20 pages, 15701 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Ground Displacement in East Azerbaijan Province, Iran, Revealed by L-band and C-band InSAR Analyses

by Sadra Karimzadeh and Masashi Matsuoka

Sensors 2020, 20(23), 6913; https://doi.org/10.3390/s20236913 - 3 Dec 2020

Cited by 13 | Viewed by 3677

Abstract

Iran, as a semi-arid and arid country, has a water challenge in the recent decades and underground water extraction has been increased because of improper developments in the agricultural sector. Thus, detection and measurement of ground subsidence in major plains is of great importance for hazard mitigation purposes. In this study, we carried out a time series small baseline subset (SBAS) interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) analysis of 15 L-band PALSAR-2 images acquired from ascending orbits of the ALOS-2 satellite between 2015 and 2020 to investigate long-term ground displacements in East Azerbaijan Province, Iran. We found that two major parts of the study area (Tabriz and Shabestar plains) are subsiding, where the mean and maximum vertical subsidence rates are −10 and −98 mm/year, respectively. The results revealed that the visible subsidence patterns in the study area are associated with either anthropogenic activities (e.g., underground water usage) or presence of compressible soils along the Tabriz–Shabestar and Tabriz–Azarshahr railways. This implies that infrastructure such as railways and roads is vulnerable if progressive ground subsidence takes over the whole area. The SBAS results deduced from L-band PALSAR-2 data were validated with field observations and compared with C-band Sentinel-1 results for the same period. The C-band Sentinel-1 results showed good agreement with the L-band PALSAR-2 dataset, in which the mean and maximum vertical subsidence rates are −13 and −120 mm/year, respectively. For better visualization of the results, the SBAS InSAR velocity map was down-sampled and principal component analysis (PCA) was performed on ~3600 randomly selected time series of the study area, and the results are presented by two principal components (PC1 and PC2). Full article

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14 pages, 2665 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Implementation of a Phase Synchronization Scheme Based on Pulsed Signal at Carrier Frequency for Bistatic SAR

by Yafeng Chen, Da Liang, Haixia Yue, Dacheng Liu, Xiayi Wu, Heng Zhang, Yuanbo Jiao, Kaiyu Liu and Robert Wang

Sensors 2020, 20(11), 3188; https://doi.org/10.3390/s20113188 - 4 Jun 2020

Cited by 5 | Viewed by 2785

Abstract

Phase synchronization is one of the key technical challenges and prerequisites for the bistatic synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system, which can form a single-pass interferometry system to perform topographic mapping. In this paper, an advanced phase synchronization scheme based on a pulsed signal at carrier frequency is proposed for a bistatic SAR system and it is verified by a ground validation system. In the proposed phase synchronization scheme, the pulsed signal at carrier frequency is used for phase synchronization link, and it is exchanged by virtue of a time slot between radar signals. The feasibility of the scheme is proven by theoretical analysis of various factors affecting the performance of phase synchronization, and the reliability of the scheme is verified by the test results of the ground validation system. Full article

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Microwave Remote Sensing and Applications: New Challenges of the Earth Observation (EO) Technology for the Building of a More Resilient Society to Natural Disasters

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