Performance Analysis of Pioneer Single Baseline Phase Unwrapping Techniques

Abstract

Phase unwrapping is a key step in the interferogram processing chain. This process reconstructs the phase images to obtain a 3D presentation of the scanned surface called digital elevation model. From 80's to date, several phase unwrapping algorithms have been proposed whose performance differs from one algorithm to another. Some algorithms are fast or accurate and there are other approaches that try to attain a tradeoff between accuracy and processing time. This paper analyzes the performance of some pioneering methods in the phase unwrapping field. The chosen methods are implemented and tested for real inSAR data provided by ESA ERS-1, and compared according to several relevant criteria to assess the computation time and accuracy of each one.