Remote monitoring of a concrete bridge using PS-InSAR

Structural health monitoring (SHM) can support decision makers in structural integrity management by providing information about occurrence of damage and its evolution in time. Recently, due to new Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) missions, remote sensing through active satellites provides a promising methodology capable of monitoring infrastructure assets. This paper investigates the use of Multi-Temporal Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (MT-InSAR) processing to monitor the structural health of bridges. The full interferometry processing chain is applied using Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar data and a combination of open-source routines from the Sentinel Application Platform (SNAP) and Stanford Method for Persistent Scatterers (StaMPS). Displacement time-histories are derived from single look complex products by employing the Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PS-InSAR) technique. The PS-InSAR technique is applied to study the behavior of a concrete bridge located over the Oglio river in Isola Dovarese, Italy, on which also GNSS receivers are installed. The GNSS data are then used to validate the PS-InSAR measurements. The effects on PS-InSAR results of the number of SAR images used as well of the target structure are investigated.