ABSTRACT
Chapter 14 involves synthetic aperture radar for cultural heritage monitoring. Cultural heritage, which is a representation of past civilization, plays a significant role in people’s mindset and faith. Climate change and anthropogenic activities show the importance of cultural heritage monitoring in the 21st century. The development of the SAR sensor offered a futuristic way to monitor heritage sites more precisely. All-weather capability and the advent of interferometry techniques have helped the remote sensing community to use SAR for cultural heritage monitoring. The present study focuses on monitoring Angkor Wat, a temple that is a UNESCO cultural heritage site. The study uses the persistent scatterer interferometric synthetic aperture radar (PSInSAR) technique, which is an advanced interferometric technique to find long-term deformation patterns. This study found a deformation pattern over 15 years using ALOS PALSAR-1 and ALOS PALASAR-2 and Sentinel-1. The study monitors the deformation in three time periods with the help of seven interferometric data of ALOS PALSAR-1 from 2006 to 2009, ten interferometric scenes of ALOS-2 PALSAR-2 from 2014 to 2018, and forty-nine Sentinel-1 interferometric data from 2017 to 2021. It is found that the temple is stable from 2006 to 2021 with some minor deformation surrounding the temple premises.
