Amplitude based InSAR stack multi-looking: Performance and applications

Efficient estimation of the interferometric phase and complex correlation is fundamental for the full exploitation of SAR Interferometry capabilities [1]. Particularly when combining interferometric measures arising both from distributed and concentrated point targets, the interferometric phase has to be correctly extracted in order to preserve its physical meaning and respect the homogeneity hypothesis that we assume when performing a coherent averaging [2]. Recently, an amplitude-based algorithm for the adaptive multilooking of InSAR stacks was proposed [3], [4] where it 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.