Assessment of the Applicability of DInSAR Techniques for Structural Monitoring of Cultural Heritage and Archaeological Sites

Structural health monitoring (SHM) practices have become increasingly important in the field of vulnerability assessment and risk mitigation of cultural heritage, especially after the past strong seismic events. The monitoring practice of monumental buildings and archaeological sites could be really expensive using traditional on-site techniques. In recent years, many steps towards have been taken in the development of Differential Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (DInSAR) techniques, which allow monitoring huge areas both in ordinary maintenance situations and post-emergency conditions. This work aims to analyse the applicability of recent DInSAR techniques for the structural monitoring of buildings belonging to cultural heritage and archaeological sites. After a literature review highlighting the most relevant applications in this field, two case studies from the built cultural heritage are examined to evaluate the major issues occurring in the use of DInSAR data and their reliability for monitoring the health status of these structures. COSMO-SkyMed data relative to the urban area of Rome in the period 2011‒2019 are used for the analyses. The small baseline subset (SBAS) processing technique was employed to obtain interferometric displacement measures