A novel hybrid method to unwrapping interferometric phase

Phase unwrapping is the most difficult and unavoidable problem in the interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) processing procedures. Intensive researches have been done and the methods proposed were summarized into two categories: path following and minimum norm. Unwrapping result by path following is congruent with wrapped phase and require less time and memory. While minimum norm method usually could not obtain congruent result directly and take more computing resource. Weighting could improve phase unwrapping result very much if the suspicious region could be correctively separated out by weighting function. However, common used weighting such as coherence or phase gradient could not serve this purpose very well. In this paper, we proposed a novel method to unwrap phase, which combined the advantages of both categories, and set weight based on phase unwrapping consistence. We demonstrated the method with real InSAR phase. The unwrapping result showed the novel method could recover the dynamic range of phase than least square method while keep correct trend.