Simultaneous Classification and Location of Volcanic Deformation in SAR Interferograms Using a Convolutional Neural Network

Abstract

AbstractWith the evolution of interferometric synthetic aperture radar into a tool for active hazard monitoring, new methods are sought to quickly and automatically interpret the large number of interferograms that are created. We present a convolutional neural network (CNN) that is able to both classify the type of deformation, and to locate the deformation within an interferogram in a single step. We achieve this through building a “two headed model,” which returns both outputs after one forward pass of an interferogram through the network. We train our model by first creating a data set of synthetic interferograms, but find that our model's performance is improved through the inclusion of real Sentinel‐1 data. We also investigate how model performance can be improved by best organizing interferograms such that they can exploit the three channel nature of computer vision models trained on very large databases of labeled color images, but find that using different data in each of the three input channels degrades performance when compared to the simple case of repeating wrapped or unwrapped phase across each channel. We also release our labeled Sentinel‐1 interferograms as a database named VolcNet, which consists of ∼500,000 labeled interferograms. VolcNet comprises of time series of unwrapped phase and labels of the magnitude, location, and duration of deformation, which allows for the automatic creation of interferograms between any two acquisitions, and greatly increases the amount of data available compared to other labeling strategies.