Development of the Advanced Radar Satellite Remote Sensing Technology for Monitoring Urban Ground Deformation

Principal Investigator: Prof. Lin Hui

Start Date:	2007/09/01
End Date:	2008/08/31
Type of Grant:	Innnovation & Technology Fund

Urban ground deformation is serious environmental hazard in Hong Kong and the Mainland China. More than 70 cities in China are undergoing natural or human-induced subsidence. The disaster can led to significant damage and, driven by safety and legal liability, construction and civil engineering industries have great demands on land surface movement monitoring, especially in major cities of China.

Satellite Permanent Scatterers Interferometry, (PSI) is a promising technology that offers low cost, large-coverage deformation monitoring and up to sub-millimeter accuracy. However, due to insufficient archive images available to many China and Asian cities, PSI can hardly be widely applied in the region. This proposed project aims to develop the Advanced PSI (A-PSI) to overcome PSI¡¦s limitations in the region. A-PSI relaxes the PSI¡¦s constraints and can be applied in linear or non-linear deformation (e.g. landslide) scenarios. Moreover, A-PSI can also be applied to areas of interests even with a limited SAR archive images (e.g. China and other countries in Asian). The developed technologies and services can be adopted by the various players in the local construction industry including public and private organizations and will bring new business opportunities to the local industry to engage the engineering consultancy business in China.