Multipass Synthetic Aperture Radar for Monitoring the Built Environment and Preservation of the Cultural Heritage

Dear Colleagues,

Applications of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) to the monitoring of environmental risk have boosted the investments in the sector. Particularly, satellite platforms hosting advanced SAR sensor able to operate with different illuminating modes and capable of acquiring, repeatedly over the time, data almost everywhere on the Earth surface have been made operational, with an exponential increase in the last decade.

Starting from 2007, the launch of COSMO-SkyMed and TerraSAR-X marked a significant advance for application to the monitoring of the built environment: X-Band SAR sensors, able to enhance considerably the resolution capabilities of satellite imaging radars with Very High Resolution (VHR) modes, were made available to the scientific community. With this regard, even access to data acquired with special sub-metric resolution modes has been provided.

The VHR satellite portfolio has been further enriched by satellite programs of private companies and integrated also by C-Band sensors able to operate VHR modes (e-g, RadarSAT-2 and Gaofen-3).

Today, more than ten years after from the opening of the “VHR era,” many services based on the use of VHR SAR data, acquired over long acquisition intervals with the same illumination geometry (i.e., useful for coherent processing) have been set up. This is the case of the operation interferometric processing chains exploited as monitoring tools of areas subject to natural and anthropic hazards. Nevertheless, research is still expanding to move the frontiers of the applications, especially with respect to the built environment. This involves, for instance, the development of approaches able to overcome the limitations of the imaging geometry for application to the monitoring of the built environment, e.g., urban areas, infrastructures and cultural heritage.

Built environment and cultural heritage worldwide often face environmental and human-induced hazards that can potentially threaten their integrity, security, historical value, and accessibility. In particular, nowadays the preservation of cultural heritage is a strategic priority, not only to assure cultural treasures and evidence of human past for future generations, but also to exploit them as strategic and valuable economic assets to promote sustainable development strategies.

In recognition of the increasing role of SAR technology for built environment monitoring and cultural heritage preservation, this Special Issue aims to highlight the recent advancements and developments of multitemporal SAR processing, including multibaseline interferometric and tomographic processing. In this regard, we solicit papers describing challenging conceptual and practical problems.

With reference to the built environment and cultural heritage, potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Advanced Methodologies Exploiting SAR Images
• Multitemporal SAR Imaging, including Multibaseline InSAR, Advanced DInSAR; Persistent Scatterers Interferometry
• SAR Tomography Approaches
• Future Space SAR Missions and New Generations SAR sensors
• Integration of Multipass SAR data and proximal/in-situ sensing data

Review articles covering one or more of these topics are also welcome.

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Remote Sensing is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• synthetic aperture radar (SAR)
• interferometric SAR (InSAR), SAR interferometry
• differential interferometric SAR (DInSAR), differential SAR interferometry
• multibaseliene/multitemporal DInSAR (MB/MT DInSAR), advanced DInSAR (A-DInSAR), persistent scatterers interferometry (PSI)
• SAR tomography
• built environment, urban area and infrastructures monitoring
• cultural heritage