ADAPTIVE SPATIAL FILTERING OF INTERFEROMETRIC DATA STACK ORIENTED TO DISTRIBUTED SCATTERERS

Abstract. Standard interferometry poses a challenge in non-urban areas due to temporal and spatial decorrelation of the radar signal, where there is high signal noise. Techniques such as Small Baseline Subset Algorithm (SBAS) have been proposed to make use of multiple interferometric combinations to alleviate the problem. However, the interferograms used in SBAS are multilooked with a boxcar (rectangle) filter to reduce phase noise, resulting in a loss of resolution and signal superstition from different objects. In this paper, we proposed a modified adaptive spatial filtering algorithm for accurate estimation of interferogram and coherence without resolution loss even in rural areas, to better support the deformation monitoring with time series interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) technique. The implemented method identifies the statistically homogenous pixels in a neighbourhood based on the goodness-of-fit test, and then applies an adaptive spatial filtering of interferograms. Three statistical tests for the identification of distributed targets will be presented, applied to real data. PALSAR data of the yellow river delta in China is used for demonstrating the effectiveness of this algorithm in rural areas.