Quality Control (QC) for each step to determin subsidence

Microwave Toolbox
2

let’s go through the single steps

  1. TOPS Split: If the output has only VV and a smaller extent, it worked
  2. Apply Orbit File: Check under Metadata > Abstracted Metadata > Orbit State Vectors . The number of entries (orbit_vector1, orbit_vector2) should have increased.
  3. BackGeocoding: Create an RGB image to check if the two images are correctly aligned (example)
  4. Enhanced Spectral Diversity: Open View > Tool Windows > Radar > InSAR Stack Tool and check the RMSE of the coregistration.
  5. Interferogram generation: You can visually check if the inteferogram has good quality (visible fringes, little noise, no trends) and if the coherence is sufficiently high throughout the image. Low coherence indicates phase decorrelation (bad quality). Also select “output elevation” to check the quality of the DEM which is used for topographic phase removal. If it has gaps or errors, the topographic phase will be estimated incorrectly as well.
  6. Unwrapping: Also mostly checked visually - are all areas unwrapped correctly, are there any artefacts (introduced by tiling, check the last page of this tutorial)
  7. Phase to displacement: How does the overall displacement pattern look - does it have overall trends superimposing local displacement. Is the displacement band normalized correctly? See page 25 of this tutorial for an example.
  8. Range Doppler Terrain Correction: Not much to check here - it’s simply a geocoding based on a DEM. Again, does the result look plausibe?

Most of the steps do not result in a right or wrong output or deliver a numeric quality indicator. It is rather the task of the user to question if the processed intermediate products make sense and if they are free of visual errors before proceeding to the next step.

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