Phase Unwrapping for SAR Interferometry—A Data Fusion Approach by Kalman Filtering

This paper considers the problem of unwrapping the phase image obtained from a noisy interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) image. The implicit nonlinearity of the problem is reflected, as well as the drawbacks of this nonlinearity on the performance of phase unwrapping approaches. Some general concepts concerning basic estimation techniques are shortly reviewed. On this background, a Kalman filter-based data fusion approach to unwrap and simultaneously filter the phases of InSAR images is developed. The data fusion concept exploits phase information extracted from the complex interferogram rather than from the phase image and fuses that information with phase slope information extracted from the power spectral density of the interferogram.