A Novel Method for Deformation Estimation Based on Multibaseline InSAR Phase Unwrapping

Abstract

The three-pass differential synthetic aperture radar interferometry (DInSAR) is one of the approaches in radar interferometry applications for measuring the deformation of the earth surface. The conventional three-pass DInSAR needs a successful single-baseline (SB) phase unwrapping (PU) procedure on each interferogram to ensure accurate deformation monitoring. Because of the limitation of the phase continuity assumption, the SB PU becomes a challenging processing step when the study area has strong phase variation. In this paper, the multibaseline (MB) InSAR PU methodology, which can eliminate the phase continuity assumption by means of the baseline diversity, is transplanted into the conventional three-pass DInSAR domain. Based on MB PU, a novel terrain deformation estimation approach is developed. Both theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is an effective surface deformation estimation method.