Bi- and three-dimensional urban change detection using sentinel-1 SAR temporal series

Urban areas are subject to multiple and very different changes, in a two- and three-dimensional sense, mostly as a consequence of human activities, such as urbanization, but also because of catastrophic and sudden events, such as earthquakes, landslides, or floods. This paper aims at designing a procedure able to cope with both types of changes by combining interferometric coherence and backscatter amplitude, and provide a semantically meaningful analysis of the changes detected in both city inner cores and suburban areas. Specifically, this paper focuses on detecting multi-dimensional changes in urban areas using a stack of repeat-pass SAR data sets from Sentinel-1A/B satellites. The proposed procedure jointly exploits amplitude and coherence time series to perform this task. SAR amplitude is used to extract changes about the urban extents, i.e. in 2D, while interferometric coherence is sensitive to the presence of buildings and to their size, i. e. to 3D changes. The proposed algorithm is tested using a time-series of two years of Sentinel-1 data, from May 2016 to October 2018, and in two different Chinese cities, Changsha and Hangzhou, with the aim to understand both the temporal evolution of the urban extents, and the changes within what is constantly classified as “urban” throughout the considered time period.