ON THE USE OF DIRECTIONAL STATISTICS FOR THE ADAPTIVE SPATIAL MULTI-LOOKING OF SEQUENCES OF DIFFERENTIAL SAR INTERFEROGRAMS

In this work, a new method for the noise filtering and the adaptive multi-looking of a sequence of multi-temporal differential SAR interferograms, which relies on the use of directional (circular) statistics, is presented. At variance with other similar approaches, which identify homogenous distributed scatterers (DS) in a resolution cell by analyzing the statistics of the complex-valued single-look-complex (SLC) SAR images, our method is exclusively based on the analysis of statistics of the phase interferograms, thus making no other assumptions. The developed technique can be applied to generate adaptive multi-look interferograms both at the native grid of full-resolution images and/or at the multi-look resolution scale. The preliminary experimental results, achieved by applying the proposed approach to a dataset consisting in 93 SAR data acquired by the ERS-1/2 radar sensors from 1992 to 2008 over the Gulf of Napoli and its surrounding area (South Italy) confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.