A Region-growing Phase Unwrapping Approach Based on Local Frequency Estimation for Interferometric SAR

We propose a phase unwrapping approach. With local frequencies estimated by the maximum likelihood (ML) estimator, the unwrapped phase at the central pixel of a local image is obtained by fitting unwrapped phases with an ideal plane assumed. We take a region-growing strategy in which a quality map guides the phase unwrapping from high-quality pixels to low-quality pixels, minimizing the propagation of errors. Experimental results, carried out on simulated data, show the advantage of the proposed approach over other approaches in accuracy, and furthermore the efficiency of the proposed approach is validated by a real-data experiment