Application of Independent Component Analysis on ERS SAR Interferograms for the Elimination of Spurious Artifacts

The Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) phase shifts can be considered as overlapping contributions from different phenomena. Based on this, the new ` InSAR-ICA´ technique has recently been developed for deriving the nominal topographical and surface deformation components. The InSAR-ICA´s innovation is its capability to reach good performance by minimal or null non-SAR data, even in case of very few SAR interferograms available for the observational area. Therefore, it allows the SAR monitoring of unreachable areas and in case of no availability of meteorological data that are sufficiently simultaneous to SAR acquisition times for the atmospheric corrections. In this paper, a summary description of the InSAR-ICA technique is given, with specific references to the usefulness of its application on mountainous areas.