Complementarity of high-resolution COSMO-SkyMed and medium-resolution Sentinel-1 SAR interferometry: Quantitative analysis of real target displacement and 3D positioning measurement precision, and potential operational scenarios

The availability of several sensors with complementarity characteristics, in terms of spatial resolution and tasking flexibility, offers new opportunities for SAR interferometry applications. In this work, we quantitatively discuss the complementarity of C-band low-resolution sensors (Sentinel-1 and Envisat) and the X-band high-resolution COSMO-SkyMed SAR constellation, both with theoretical analyses and experiments, focusing the comparison on interferometric measurements on real targets, in terms of density, deformation precision, and 3D positioning precision. Moreover, we provide a characterization of the measurement precision as a function of the interferometric baseline values. The obtained results confirm that whereas Sentinel-1 can systematically cover very large areas, COSMO-SkyMed can guarantee a more detailed analysis, which can be fundamental for building and infrastructure monitoring. © 2017 IEEE.