A TOOL FOR 2+1D PHASE UNWRAPPING: APPLICATION EXAMPLES

This paper is focused on a new 3D phase unwrapping procedure, named 2+1D unwrapping, which works on large stacks of differential interferometric SAR data. The procedure firstly performs a 2D phase unwrapping, which is followed by a kind of 1D phase unwrapping, i.e. the phases are unwrapped by connecting them along the time. For this reason the entire procedure performs a 2+1D phase unwrapping. The paper starts with a description of the phase unwrapping strategy, which is based on iterative least squares and an ad hoc outlier rejection procedure that take advantage of the nature of the phase unwrapping errors. The effectiveness of the procedure is illustrated by analysing different examples based on Envisat ASAR and Terrasar-X SAR data processed by the Institute of Geomatics and the Earth Sciences Department of the Universita degli Studi di Milano.