MasTer: A Full Automatic Multi-Satellite InSAR Mass Processing Tool for
Rapid Incremental 2D Ground Deformation Time Series
Abstract
The increasing amount of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites
orbiting the Earth, their increasing time and space resolution, the
variety of wavelengths, polarizations and looking geometries, the
shortening of data availability latency and the lengthening of archive
databases offer unprecedented opportunities for Earth observation and
hazard monitoring. The downside is that it brings new challenges for
processing that huge amount of data and for making the results quickly
analyzable. To fully benefit from these advances in SAR, it requires
efficient data processing infrastructure (optimized for processing
speed, storage usage and security), efficient data visualization, and
standardization of the final products for easy ingestion by conventional
analysis tools. We present here the InSAR Mass processing Toolbox for
Multidimensional time series (MasTer), which can combine any type of SAR
data to produce unsupervised vertical and horizontal ground deformation
time series. MasTer is optimized to automatically download SAR data,
select the appropriate interferometric pairs, perform the
interferometric mass processing, compute the geocoded deformation maps,
invert and display the velocity maps and the 2D time series on a web
page updated incrementally as soon as a new image is made available. The
incremental architecture allows updating the time series within the
shortest time possible (typically a few hours) as soon as a new SAR
image is provided. Several steps are self-evaluating to ensure robust
and reliable processing. Moreover, recent methodological improvement
consists in the computation of a coherence proxy to guide the pair
selection optimization balancing the use of each image as primary and
secondary image during the differential interferometric (DInSAR)
processing. Such a pair selection increases both the processing
efficiency and the signal-to-noise ratio of the time series. MasTer also
allows the production of time series of coherences or SAR amplitude
images, which can be used e.g. for land use monitoring or
geomorphological changes detection. The capabilities and performances of
MasTer will be illustrated with several examples. Software and manual
are available upon request from the authors.