Robust 2-D phase unwrapping based on multiresolution

An approach to 2-d phase unwrapping for SAR interferometry is presented, based on separate steps of coarse phase and fine phase estimation. The coarse phase is constructed from instantaneous frequency estimates obtained using adaptive multiresolution, in which estimation is done of difference frequencies between resolution levels, and the frequency differences are summed over resolution levels such that a conservative phase gradient field is maintained. This allows a smoothed coarse unwrapped phase, which achieves the full terrain height, to be obtained with an unweighted least squares phase construction. The coarse phase is used to remove the bulk of the phase variation of the interferogram, allowing more accurate multilooking, and the resulting fine phase is unwrapped with weighted least squares. The unwrapping approach is verified on simulated interferograms.