Analysis and evaluation of InSAR phase unwrapping approaches

In recent years SAR interferometry has become a widely used technique for measuring altitude and displacement of the surface of the earth. Phase unwrapping of the interferometric SAR is a very important step to obtain an accurate DEM(Digital Elevation Model)[1,2,3],and phase unwrapping is not only crucial in InSAR but also a major source in InSAR errors. Therefore, with GAMMA software, VC++ and MATLAB coding implementing six kinds of phase unwrapping approaches,this paper presents the best method for different situations through two sets of experimental results used for analysing and comparing run time and precision. In the plain and alpine area, the best phase unwrapping methods are separately Goldstein branch-cut method and Minimum Cost Network Flow method.