INTERFEROMETRIC SAR PHASE UNWRAPPING USING THE FINITE-ELEMENT METHOD

The authors present a new two-dimensional algorithm for interferometri c synthetic aperture radar phase unwrapping based on the finite elemen t method. The proposed technique allows an efficient least-squares sol ution carried out in time domain. Weighting functions can be introduce d without increasing computational requirements. The possibility to sp eed up computations via a multigrid technique is discussed. A noise-ro bust extension of the proposed technique is also investigated. Present ed experiments on real ERS-1 data, as well as on simulated patterns, d emonstrate the precision and efficiency of the procedure.