A comparison of phase unwrapping techniques in synthetic aperture radar interferometry

Abstract

A comparison of different phase unwrapping techniques based on the least mean square error is presented. A testing environment based on simulated interferograms has been created in order to assess the methods described in the literature. Each of them has shown good properties under different constraints. Multigrid with a previous adaptive maximum likelihood gradient estimation is very robust when strong aliasing is not expected. In a general scenario with aliasing, an adaptive multiresolution gradient estimator gives a coarse approximation to the low resolution topography.