Preprocessing of SAR interferometric data using anisotropic diffusion filter

The most commonly used smoothing algorithms for complex data processing are blurring functions (i.e., Hanning, Taylor weighting, Gaussian, etc.). Unfortunately, the filters so designed blur the edges in a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) scene, reduce the accuracy of features, and blur the fringe lines in an interferogram. For the Digital Surface Map (DSM) extraction, the blurring of these fringe lines causes inaccuracies in the height of the unwrapped terrain surface. Our goal here is to perform spatially non-uniform smoothing to overcome the above mentioned disadvantages. This is achieved by using a Complex Anisotropic Non-Linear Diffuser (CANDI) filter that is a spatially varying. In particular, an appropriate choice of the convection function in the CANDI filter is able to accomplish the non-uniform smoothing. This boundary sharpening intra-region smoothing filter acts on interferometric SAR (IFSAR) data with noise to produce an interferogram. with significantly reduced noise contents and desirable local smoothing. Results of CANDI filtering will be discussed and compared with those obtained by using the standard filters on simulated data.