Adaptive InSAR Stack Multilooking Exploiting Amplitude Statistics: A Comparison between Different Techniques and Practical Results

Abstract

Efficient estimation of the interferometric phase and complex correlation is fundamental for the full exploitation of SAR Interferometry capabilities. Particularly when combining interferometric measures arising both from distributed and concentrated targets, the interferometric phase has to be correctly extracted in order to preserve its physical meaning. Recently, an amplitude-based algorithm for the adaptive multilooking of InSAR stacks was proposed where is was shown that a comparison of the backscatter amplitude statistics is a suitable way to adaptively group and average the pixels in order to preserve the phase signatures of natural structures in the observed area. In this paper different methods to compare amplitude statistics will be presented, compared through simulation and applied to real data. Based on this, recommendations are made concerning which method to use in practice.