DefoEye: Python-Based Software for Facilitating Time-Series InSAR Analysis of Sentinel-1 Remote-Sensing Data

Abstract

Many existing time-series Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (TS-InSAR) software tools have limitations, including restricted geographic applicability, commercial licensing, and incomplete end-to-end processing support. Although GMTSAR avoids some of these constraints, it still requires substantial manual intervention and C-shell commands, lacks a user-friendly graphical interface, and omits important steps such as interferogram network pruning and anchoring of unwrapped interferograms. This paper introduces DefoEye (v1), an open-source Python-based software package that wraps GMTSAR and provides a unified, user-friendly TS-InSAR workflow for Sentinel-1 data. DefoEye supports parallel job execution, interferogram network pruning, and multiple anchoring options. Its performance was evaluated from 2020 to 2024 in four regions with different geological settings, deformation mechanisms, and atmospheric and climatic conditions. In Bologna, Italy; Gotland, Sweden; and Houston, USA, DefoEye results were compared with observations from 10 GNSS stations and showed strong agreement, with RMSE values of 4.3-11.9 mm and Pearson correlation coefficients of 0.63-0.95. In Karaj, Iran, where GNSS observations were unavailable, DefoEye was compared with other widely used processing tools and achieved similarly close agreement, with an RMSE of 4.8 mm/yr and a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.98. These results demonstrate that DefoEye provides reliable TS-InSAR products for geological, hydrological, and environmental applications.