A ConvLSTM Neural Network Model for Spatiotemporal Prediction of Mining Area Surface Deformation Based on SBAS-InSAR Monitoring Data

The surface deformation caused by underground mining leads to damage to surface buildings and brings potential safety hazards and property losses. The demand for reliable prediction methods of surface deformation in mining areas is becoming increasingly significant. At present, most prediction methods are based on sampling points; however, these methods neglect to consider local and overall spatial features, and this oversight affects the spatial accuracy of prediction results. The data form of the prediction output is often discontinuous and not intuitive. In order to solve this problem, the spatiotemporal prediction method of surface deformation in mining areas is a very effective proposal. However, few scholars have proposed a solution based on this idea. In this study, a convolution long short-term memory (ConvLSTM) neural network for surface deformation spatiotemporal prediction based on time-series interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) is proposed to directly predict the overall spatial deformation of the surface in the mining area. First, based on Sentinel-1A images of the Jinchuan Mining Area, Jinchang, Gansu province, China, the time-series InSAR surface deformation data of the study area from January 2018 to October 2020 (81 scenes) are obtained using small baseline subset InSAR (SBAS-InSAR) technology. Because of the large value scale of surface deformation in the mining area, we propose a method to fit the maximum and minimum values of time-series deformation, respectively, and carry out piecewise numerical compression. Then, based on the ConvLSTM neural network layer, construct the spatiotemporal prediction model of time-series InSAR surface deformation. Support vector regression (SVR), multilayer perceptron (MLP) regression, and the gray model [GM (1,1)] are used as benchmark methods. The prediction results of our models are compared with the three benchmark methods. The comparison results show that the prediction effect of the ConvLSTM model with optimal input time steps is significantly better than the benchmark methods in the comprehensive performance of various evaluation metrics, especially for the metrics used to evaluate the error. This shows that the ConvLSTM model has relatively fine spatiotemporal prediction performance for time-series InSAR surface deformation. Based on the InSAR time-series deformation monitoring results of the Jinchuan Mining Area, we carry out the spatiotemporal prediction of surface deformation in the subsequent 50 time steps (600 days). The results agree with the natural deformation development law in band collection statistics and 3-D representation of deformation; moreover, the reliability of numerical spatial distribution is relatively high. This result can be used to intuitively evaluate the overall surface deformation of the mining area in the monitoring range, find potential hazards in time, and take measures to address these hazards quickly. At the same time, this research process also provides a new concept design for such problems.

Automated summary

The surface deformation caused by underground mining has detrimental effects on surface buildings and poses safety hazards and property losses. Reliable prediction methods for surface deformation in mining areas are in high demand. Current prediction methods based on sampling points neglect local and overall spatial features, affecting the accuracy of prediction results. The proposed spatiotemporal prediction method using ConvLSTM neural network shows superior performance in predicting time-series InSAR surface deformation.