Improved Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar processing via advanced co-registration and phase correction techniques

Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) applies the interferograms of two or more SAR images to generate maps of surface deformation or digital elevation models. InSAR operational processing chain for displacement map generation comprises of five major stages: co-registration and re-sampling, interferogram generation, flat-earth correction, topography correction and phase unwrapping. This paper discusses and evaluates the authors´ proposed algorithms for SAR image matching and for topographic and reference-phase corrections, which improve conventional InSAR processing techniques in terms of increasing efficiency and reducing the time and computational effort. Our proposed algorithms are implemented in MATLAB and evaluated with respect to the conventional InSAR processing performed by DORIS software for a pair of Envisat ASAR data associated with the 2003 BAM earthquake.