InSAR-BM3D: A Nonlocal Filter for SAR Interferometric Phase Restoration

Abstract

The block-matching 3-D (BM3D) algorithm, based on the nonlocal approach, is one of the most effective methods to date for additive white Gaussian noise image denoising. Likewise, its extension to synthetic aperture radar (SAR) amplitude images, SAR-BM3D, is a state-of-the-art SAR despeckling algorithm. In this paper, we further extend BM3D to address the restoration of SAR interferometric phase images. While keeping the general structure of BM3D, its processing steps are modified to take into account the peculiarities of the SAR interferometry signal. Experiments on simulated and real-world Tandem-X SAR interferometric pairs prove the effectiveness of the proposed method.