Phase Unwrapping using 2D-Kalman Filter - Potential and Limitations

In the SAR community there are many methods offered for solving the problem of unwrapping the phase obtained from a noisy interferometric SAR (InSAR) image [2-5]. Generally a Kalman filter is a powerful tool to obtain accurate model based estimates out of different sources of information. All the given information is fused in a efficient way and also the noise is cancelled optimally. Because of this a Kalman filter based data fusion approach to unwrap and simultaneously filter the phases of interferometric SAR images is developed. The data fusion concept exploits phase information, extracted from the complex interferogram rather than from the phase image and fuses that information with phase slope information extracted from the power spectral density of the interferogram. The paper explains a Kalman filter method for phase unwrapping purposes and discusses the pros and cons of this approach.