Adaptive InSAR Stack Multilooking Exploiting Amplitude Statistics: A Comparison Between Different Techniques and Practical Results

• Published in: IEEE geoscience and remote sensing letters Vol. 8; no. 3; pp. 441 - 445
• Main Authors: Parizzi, A, Brcic, R
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 01-05-2011; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Adaptive algorithms; Adaptive multilooking; Amplitudes; Backscattering; Coherence; coherence estimation; Computer simulation; Interferometric synthetic aperture radar; interferometry; Kernel; Pixel; Preserves; radar backscatter statistics; Remote sensing; Shape; Stacks; Statistics; Studies; Synthetic aperture radar; synthetic aperture radar (SAR)
• ISSN: 1545-598X; 1558-0571
• DOI: 10.1109/LGRS.2010.2083631

Efficient estimation of the interferometric phase and complex correlation is fundamental for the full exploitation of interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) capabilities. Particularly, when combining interferometric measures arising both from distributed and concentrated targets, the interferometric phase has to be correctly extracted in order to preserve its physical meaning. Recently, an amplitude-based algorithm for the adaptive multilooking of InSAR stacks was proposed where it was shown that a comparison of the backscatter amplitude statistics is a suitable way to adaptively group and average the pixels in order to preserve the phase signatures of natural structures in the observed area. In this letter, different methods to compare amplitude statistics will be presented, compared through simulation and applied to real data. Based on these, recommendations are made concerning which method to use in practice.