InSAR Local Co-Registration Method Assisted by Shape-From-Shading

Interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) is a useful technology to observe the earth topography. However, a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferogram usually includes a lot of rotational points, that is, singular points (SPs). SPs seriously affect the quality of generated digital elevation model (DEM). One of the dominant origins of the SPs is the local distortion in the co-registration of the master and slave images, which are the source of the interferogram. Previously, we proposed a local and fine co-registration method of the master and the slave using the number of SPs as the evaluation criterion (SPEC method). In this paper, we propose an improved version of the SPEC method which uses the shape-from-shading technique additionally for a better adjustment. In comparison to the conventional SPEC method, results indicate that the proposed technique improves the signal-to-noise ratio of the created DEM from InSAR images.