Two-Dimensional Phase Unwrapping for Topography Reconstruction: A Refined Two-Stage Programming Approach

The interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) is able to reconstruct the Earth's surface topography with a meter-level accuracy when two-dimensional phase unwrapping (PU) is properly implemented. The two-stage programming approach (TSPA) can convert the ill-posed PU problem into a well-posed problem by integrating perpendicular baseline diversity in multiple (>= 2) interferograms, and is currently among the most commonly used multibaseline (MB) PU algorithms. Nevertheless, TSPA still faces two challenges in real-world applications: first, TSPA cannot ensure exceptional performance for any complex topographic scenarios, and second, the PU error of short-baseline interferometric pair tends to propagate into the PU solution of long-baseline interferometric pair, degrading height accuracy. To overcome these issues, a refined TSPA (R-TSPA) MB PU algorithm is proposed in this article. R-TSPA contains two PU procedures under the framework of TSPA, where procedure 1 unwraps the flattened interferograms with TSPA, and procedure 2 re-estimates and reunwraps the erroneous ambiguity number gradients with TSPA. It is demonstrated that R-TSPA outperforms the conventional single-baseline PU algorithms and TSPA with actual InSAR datasets in western Sichuan Province and Tibet Autonomous Region of China, revealing its potentials in accurately mapping topography and broadening application scopes of InSAR.