Interferometric SAR phase unwrapping using the finite element method

The authors present a new two-dimensional algorithm for interferometric synthetic aperture radar phase unwrapping based on the finite element method. The proposed technique allows an efficient least-squares solution carried out in time domain. Weighting functions can be introduced without increasing computational requirements. The possibility to speed up computations via a multigrid technique is discussed. A noise-robust extension of the proposed technique is also investigated. Presented experiments on real ERS-1 data, as well as on simulated patterns, demonstrate the precision and efficiency of the procedure.