URBAN DAMAGE DETECTION USING TEMPORALLY STACKED SYNTHETIC APERTURE RADAR INTERFEROMETRIC COHERENCE

In this paper, we propose a novel disaster damage detection method using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) interferometric analysis. SAR interferometric coherence analysis is an effective method for disaster monitoring especially in the urban area, where the amplitude of SAR image changes only slightly unless the damage level is high. One drawback of the interferometric coherence-based analysis is the existence of the Cram ' er-Rao lower bound. That is, a small spatial window for its ensemble averaging leads significant bias while a large window makes its spatial resolution worse. To solve this problem, we propose to extend the ensemble average window towards temporal domain by increasing the number of interferometric pairs. Conventional methods which use multiple interferometric pairs firstly calculate coherence values independently. Instead, the proposed method unifies the interferograms first. We report some preliminary experimental results showing the effectiveness of the proposed method.