A Multigrid InSAR Technique for Joint Analyses at Single-Look and Multi-Look Scales

This work proposes a multigrid differential synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometry (InSAR) technique for the detection of ground displacements at different spatial scales. The method relies on efficient phase-unwrapping (PhU) operations performed at the native spatial scales. In particular, a set of multi-look interferograms are first unwrapped using conventional (or advanced) PhU algorithms at the regional scale. Subsequently, ML unwrapped interferograms are used to facilitate the PhU operations performed at the local scale (single-look). Specifically, the unwrapped multi-look interferograms are resampled to the single-look grid and modulo-2π subtracted to the single-look interferograms. These phase residuals are then unwrapped and added back to the multi-look resampled interferograms. To accomplish these operations, at variance with alternative multiscale methods, no (linear/nonlinear) models are used to fit the spatial high-pass phase residuals. Finally, the unwrapped single-look interferograms are properly inverted to retrieve the ground displacement time series using any small baseline (SB)-oriented multitemporal InSAR tool. Experimental results are performed by processing a set of SAR data acquired by the X-band COSMO-SkyMed sensor over the coastal area of Shanghai, China.