Mine Subsidence Monitoring Integrating DS-InSAR with UAV Photogrammetry Products: Case Studies on Hebei and Inner Mongolia

Frequent mining activities create a series of geological and environmental problems resulting in an immeasurable loss of life and property. Adopting effective technologies that monitor the surface subsidence of mining areas reliably and accurately is necessary. Targeting problems associated with conventional distributed scatterers interferometric synthetic aperture radar (DS-InSAR) technology, we propose a DS-InSAR technology integrating unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) photogrammetry products divided into two key technical contents: generating an external reference digital elevation model (DEM) fused with UAV DEM and refining distributed scatterers candidates (DSCs) fused with an UAV digital orthophoto map (DOM). We selected two mining areas, one in Wu'an, Hebei, and the other in Inner Mongolia, with different surface cover types, mining depths, and topographies as the research area. We used Sentinel-1A SAR images covering a mine in Wu'an from 4 November 2018 to 4 March 2019 and a mining area in Inner Mongolia from 11 June 2018 to 21 October 2018 to compare and analyze the subsidence results. We also combined these results with data from their respective field observation stations to assess accuracy. We could apply DS-InSAR technology integrated with UAV photogrammetry products to the subsidence monitoring of two mining areas with different landforms and mining characteristics. Comparing with the leveling and total station, the experimental results show that the RMSE was reduced by about 2 mm in both mining areas, and accuracy for the Wu'an region improved to a higher degree than Inner Mongolia did. Furthermore, the refinement method of DS eliminated 965 and 2948 lower-quality DSCs in the two mining areas. These demonstrate that our proposed method can effectively improve the accuracy and reliability of subsidence results from two mining areas.

Automated summary

Frequent mining activities lead to geological and environmental problems, emphasizing the need for effective monitoring technologies. This study proposes a DS-InSAR technology integrated with UAV photogrammetry products for monitoring mining area surface subsidence, and validates it in two different mining areas. The results show that the proposed method improves the accuracy and reliability of subsidence results.