A Particle Filter Approach for InSAR Phase Filtering and Unwrapping

This paper presents a new phase-unwrapping (PU) algorithm for SAR interferometry that makes use of a particle filter (PF) to perform simultaneously noise filtering and PU. The formulation of this technique provides independence from noise statistics and is not constrained by the nonlinearity of the problem. In addition, an enhanced variant of this method combining a PF with artificial-intelligence search strategies and an omnidirectional local phase estimator, based on the mode of the power spectral density, is also presented. Results obtained with synthetic and real data show a significant improvement with respect to other conventional unwrapping algorithms in some situations.