PSI Clustering for the Assessment of Underground Infrastructure Deterioration

Abstract

Remote sensing images find application in several different domains, such as land cover or land usage observation, environmental monitoring, and urbanization. This latter field has recently witnessed an interesting development with the use of remote sensing for infrastructural monitoring. In this work, we present an analysis of Sentinel-1 images, which were used to monitor the Italian provinces of Bologna and Modena located at the Emilia Region Apennines foothill. The goal of this study was the development of a machine learning-based detection system to monitor the deterioration of public aqueduct infrastructures based on Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI). We evaluated the land deformation over a temporal range of five years; these series feed a k-means clustering algorithm to separate the pixels of the region according to different deformation patterns. Furthermore, we defined the critical areas as those areas where different patterns collided or overlapped. The proposed approach provides an informative tool for the structural health monitoring of underground infrastructures.