Enhancing land subsidence awareness via InSAR data and Deep Transformers

The increasing availability of Satellite technology for Earth observation enables the monitoring of land subsidence, achieving large-scale and long-term situation awareness for supporting various human activities. Nevertheless, even with the most-recent Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) technology, one of the main limitations is signal loss of coherence. This paper introduces a novel method and tool for increasing the spatial density of the surface motion samples. The method is based on Transformers, a machine learning architecture with dominant performance, low calibration cost and agnostic method. This paper covers development and experimentation on four-years surface subsidence (2017–2021) occurring in two Italian regions, Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany, due to ground-water over-pumping using Sentinel-l data processed with P-SBAS (Parallel Small Baseline Subset) time-series analysis. Experimental results clearly show the potential of the approach. The developed system has been publicly released to guarantee its reproducibility and the scientific collaboration.