A method of airborne InSAR DEM reconstruction in layover areas

The layover phenomenon of SAR imaging arises when different height contributions collapse in the same range-azimuth resolution cell, due to the presence of strong terrain slopes or discontinuities in the scenarios. Because of the phase discontinuities, for single baseline interferometric SAR, it is difficult to recover the accurate unwrapped phase in layover areas by traditional phase unwrapping methods. In this paper, according to the phase characteristic of layover areas, we propose a new method to retrieve unwrapped phase based on local frequency estimate. It can avoid the unwrapping error resulted from the phase jump at the edge of layover areas. As a result, relative accurate DEM of layover areas can be reconstructed, which is beneficial to afterward geocoding in InSAR topographic mapping.