Single-baseline Phase Unwrapping Research Articles

A Novel 2-D Phase Unwrapping Method Based on PUMA for Aerospace Topographic Mapping Systems

Two-dimensional phase unwrapping (PU) is the key step of interferometric synthetic aperture radar technology. The accuracy of the PU results directly affects the quality of the final product. Due to the limitation of the phase continuity assumption, the results obtained by the single-baseline PU in large gradient regions are not ideal. To solve this problem, this article proposes an improved PU max-flow/min-cut algorithm (PUMA) which can efficiently deal with the phase of large gradient regions. First, we construct a quasiconvex function which is the combination of logarithmic and quadratic functions as the potential function in the energy function model of the PUMA method. Then, we use the gradient information of the external digital elevation model to assist in setting the weight of the potential function. Finally, the unwrapped phase is obtained by minimizing the new energy function model. The experimental results on the TanDEM-X dataset show that the improved approach in this article can achieve higher accuracy PU results in the region of large gradient variation than the existing PU methods.

Extended Phase Unwrapping Max-Flow/Min-Cut Algorithm for Multibaseline SAR Interferograms Using a Two-Stage Programming Approach.

Multi-baseline (MB) phase unwrapping (PU) is a key step of MB synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometry (InSAR). Compared with the traditional single-baseline (SB) PU, MB PU is applicable to the area where topography varies violently without obeying the phase continuity assumption. A two-stage programming MB PU approach (TSPA) proposed by H. Yu. builds the link between SB and MB PUs, so many existing classical SB PU methods can be transplanted into the MB domain. In this paper, an extended PU max-flow/min-cut (PUMA) algorithm for MB InSAR using the TSPA, referred to as TSPA-PUMA, is proposed, consisting of a two-stage programming procedure. In stage 1, phase gradients are estimated based on Chinese remainder theorem (CRT). In stage 2, a Markov random field (MRF) model of PUMA is designed for modeling local contextual dependence based on the phase gradients obtained by stage 1. Subsequently, the energy of the MRF model is minimized by graph cuts techniques. The experiment results illustrate that the TSPA-PUMA method can drastically enhance the accuracy of the original PUMA method in the rugged area, and is more efficient than the original TSPA method. In addition, the noise robustness of TSPA-PUMA can be improved through adding more interferograms with different baseline lengths.

An extended PUMA algorithm for multibaseline InSAR DEM reconstruction

ABSTRACT Phase unwrapping (PU) is one of the key processes in reconstructing the digital elevation model (DEM) of a scene from its corresponding interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) data. In contrast to traditional single-baseline PU, the multibaseline PU does not require phase continuity, which is useful when reconstructing the DEM in cases where the topography varies sharply. However, the performance of the multibaseline PU is directly related to the noise level, whereas the single-baseline PU algorithm has favourable noise robustness since it is based on the global wrapped phase information, e.g. the PU-max-flow (PUMA) algorithm. To improve the noise robustness of the multibaseline unwrapping process, we extend the single-baseline PUMA algorithm in this paper to a multibaseline domain, referred to as the multibaseline PUMA algorithm, which allows the unwrapping of multibaseline interferograms to generate the DEM. The proposed algorithm is less influenced by the phase continuity assumption by taking advantage of the multibaseline diversity and improves the noise robustness by using the global wrapped information from both single- and multibaseline domains. The performance of the proposed algorithm is tested on both simulated and real InSAR data experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness and noise robustness of the proposed algorithm.

The Dual-Baseline Phase Unwrapping Correction Framework for the TanDEM-X Mission Part 1: Theoretical Description and Algorithms

The TanDEM-X mission is the first free flying bistatic SAR mission. It has the primary objective to generate within a short time frame a global digital elevation model (DEM) of 10-m absolute vertical accuracy and 2-m relative height accuracy. For that, the whole land mass has been mapped at least twice with different baselines. The success of the mission depends on the accuracy of the final DEM and therefore on the reliability of the phase unwrapping (PU) algorithm. Hence, a robust and versatile PU method, which is in accordance with the acquisition concept, is necessary. This paper presents a new method that combines bistatic high-resolution interferometric data in order to perform an accurate PU on a huge amount of data. The dual-baseline PU correction (DB-PUC) framework addresses this challenge by correcting errors that occurred during the single-baseline PU procedure. It benefits from the additional information available through the differential interferogram and the stereo-radargrammetric phase , which are used to correct region-wise the ambiguity bands of the misestimated unwrapped phases to be less sensitive to noise and possible temporal changes. The multilevel of the DB-PUC approach makes it flexible, computationally efficient, and well adapted to deal with the various PU error scenarios. This framework is used operationally for the processing of the data of the TanDEM-X mission.

A Refined Cluster-Analysis-Based Multibaseline Phase-Unwrapping Algorithm

As is well known, multibaseline phase unwrapping (PU) is put forward to overcome single-baseline PU in discontinuous-terrain-height estimation. This letter presents a refined algorithm based on the cluster analysis (CA)-based noise-robust efficient multibaseline PU algorithm proposed by H. Yu. The basic idea is to combine multiple interferometric synthetic aperture radar interferograms with different baseline lengths by a linear combination. The new interferograms after the linear combination increase the ambiguity heights. The number of resulting groups on the envelope of the intercept histogram is decreased and the distance between different intercept groups is widened. Compared with the conventional CA method, the significant advantage of the refined CA (RCA) algorithm is that it improves noise robustness when the intercept groups are densely distributed. The proposed RCA algorithm is validated using the simulated interferometric data. The results demonstrate that the noise robustness performance is better than that of the CA method.

Robust Two-Dimensional Phase Unwrapping for Multibaseline SAR Interferograms: A Two-Stage Programming Approach

Multibaseline 2-D phase unwrapping (PU) is a critical step for the multibaseline synthetic aperture radar interferometry. Compared with the single-baseline PU, the multibaseline PU does not need to obey the phase continuity assumption, i.e., it is applicable to the terrain with the violent change. However, the performance of the multibaseline PU is directly related to noise level. In order to improve the noise robustness of the multibaseline PU, in this paper, we transplant the framework of the single-baseline PU into the multibaseline PU and propose a two-stage programming approach, referred to as TSPA, which makes use of the gradient information of the interferogram similar to how the conventional single-baseline PU method does. Fortunately, although the proposed method belongs to the integer programming (usually, the integer programming is an NP-hard problem which is hard to solve), the constraint of the optimization model of the TSPA method is unimodular, so it can be efficiently solved. Furthermore, interestingly, some useful and important concepts of the single-baseline PU, for example, residue and branch cut, are also transplanted into the multibaseline PU in this paper, and we discuss the potential of extending most of the representative single-baseline PU methods into the multibaseline domain as well. Finally, the experiment results show the effectiveness and noise robustness of the TSPA multibaseline PU method.

A Cluster-Analysis-Based Noise-Robust Phase-Unwrapping Algorithm for Multibaseline Interferograms

Two-dimensional phase unwrapping (PU) is a key step of synthetic aperture radar interferometry (InSAR). Moreover, the conventional single-baseline PU method is restricted to the phase continuity assumption, so it cannot work correctly in the case that phase jumps between adjacent pixels are larger than π. To effectively solve this problem, multibaseline PU is put forward. The performance of conventional multibaseline PU methods is directly related to the noise level. In order to improve noise robustness, a cluster analysis (CA) based noise-robust PU algorithm for multibaseline interferograms (CANOPUS) is proposed in this paper, which is the extension and improvement of the CA-based efficient multibaseline PU algorithm proposed by H. Yu. For the sake of overcoming the disadvantages of the CA method, the dimension of the recognizable mathematical pattern is expanded. Under this condition, due to the density discrimination in spatial space, different clusters are able to be distinguished by the density-based clustering algorithm, and clusters are regarded as a set of density-connected patterns. Compared with the conventional CA method, the significant advantage of the new algorithm is that it improves noise robustness. What is more, the proposed algorithm runs in linear time. From the experiment results, it can be seen that the proposed method may be effectively applied to multibaseline InSAR data sets.

A Cluster-Analysis-Based Efficient Multibaseline Phase-Unwrapping Algorithm

Multibaseline phase unwrapping is a critical processing procedure of multibaseline synthetic aperture radar interferometry (InSAR). It has an advantage over single-baseline phase unwrapping in discontinuous-terrain-height estimation. In this paper, the pixels' combination information of multiple InSAR interferograms with different baseline lengths is deeply investigated, and the term ambiguity vector is proposed to represent a pixel's ambiguity number of multiple interferograms. It is also revealed that pixels with the same ambiguity vector have an exclusive pattern among them. A fast cluster-analysis (CA)-based method is proposed for multibaseline phase unwrapping. In this method, all pixels are first clustered into different groups according to their patterns, and then, information of the cluster center is used to unwrap the phases of pixels group by group. Simulation results are shown to verify the effectiveness, efficiency, and noise robustness of CA multibaseline phase-unwrapping method.