DInSAR for Road Infrastructure Monitoring: Case Study Highway Network of Rome Metropolitan (Italy)

Abstract

The road network of metropolitan Rome is determined by a large number of structures located in different geological environments. To maintain security and service conditions, satellite-based monitoring can play a key role, since it can cover large areas by accurately detecting ground displacements due to anthropic activities (underground excavations, interference with other infrastructures, etc.) or natural hazards, mainly connected to the critical hydrogeological events. To investigate the area, two different Differential Interferometry Synthetic Aperture Radar (DInSAR) processing methods were used in this study: the first with open source using the Persistent Scatterers Interferometry (PSI) of SNAP-StaMPS workflow for Sentinel-1 (SNT1) and the second with the SBAS technique for Cosmo-SkyMed (CSK). The results obtained can corroborate the displacement trends due to the characteristics of the soil and the geological environments. With Sentinel-1 data, we were able to obtain the general deformation overview of the overall highways network, followed by a selection and classification of the PSI content for each section. With Cosmo-SkyMed data, we were able to increase the precision in the analysis for one sample infrastructure for which high-resolution data from CSK were available. Both datasets were demonstrated to be valuable for collecting data useful to understand the safety condition of the infrastructure and to support the maintenance actions.