Potential of SAR for monitoring transportation infrastructures: an analysis with the multi-dimensional imaging technique

Differential interferometric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has proven to be effective for accurate localization and monitoring of the displacement of ground targets. The high accuracy and spatial density of the measurements make this technique cost effective compared to the classical geodetic techniques typically used in the risk monitoring context. Ground infrastructure monitoring is typically carried out with in situ sensors. The new generation of high-resolution SAR sensors, however, allows one to acquire data sets with a spatial resolution reaching metric/submetric values. Here we investigate the application of a multi-dimensional SAR imaging technique, which is an extension of classical differential interferometric techniques, to very high resolution TerraSAR-X data in order to demonstrate the potential of this technology for monitoring of transportation infrastructures.