Human Activity Detection Based on Multipass Airborne InSAR Coherence Matrix

This letter focuses on the detection of subtle human activity, from multipass airborne interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) images, of such activities causing absolute decorrelation between two acquisitions. These activities can be vehicle track, footprint, grazing, and human construction. The millimetric sensitivity of the interferometric phase makes it valuable for detecting such activities. It can bring a large value to civil and military applications. However, there are always high false alarms in the conventional detection method. To solve this problem, a human activity detection method based on the coherence matrix is approached in this letter. In the final part of this letter, a preliminary validation of the method is provided by processing actual multipass airborne InSAR data stacks acquired by the Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences. It is noted that the proposed method reaches reliable results in comparison with the ground truth.