Investigation and modification of the inversed vortex phase field method for phase unwrapping

The paper focuses on the problem of the phase unwrapping in spaceborne remote-sensing interferometric synthesized aperture radar (InSAR) systems. Major unwrapping methods and techniques are considered and the modification of the inversed vortex phase field method of phase unwrapping for interferometric data processing of space-borne synthesized aperture radars is proposed. The modification includes the separation and unwrapping of the low-frequency phase only, and obtaining of the residual phase interferogram, which phase range does not exceed 1-2 ambiguity height values. This approach significantly reduces the number of phase residues and increases the processing speed. The other modification implies filter processing of the residual phase without phase unwrapping, which includes iterative separation of the low-frequency using the Gaussian filter and phase subtraction. This approach moves phase fringes to the relief inflection areas, and is similar to the minimum-cost flow unwrapping results. The computational complexity of the algorithm is proportional to the interferogram size and the number of the phase residues of the low-frequency phase interferogram. The accuracy of digital elevation models obtained by the algorithm was estimated using the ALOS PALSAR radar data and the reference altitude data. The results show, that the accuracy is compared with the minimum-cost flow method, but has the less computational complexity.