Image autocoregistration and InSAR interferogram estimation using joint subspace projection

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new method to estimate synthetic aperture radar interferometry (InSAR) interferometric phase in the presence of large coregistration errors. The method takes advantage of the coherence information of neighboring pixel pairs to automatically coregister the SAR images and employs the projection of the joint signal subspace onto the corresponding joint noise subspace to estimate the terrain interferometric phase. The method can automatically coregister the SAR images and reduce the interferometric phase noise simultaneously. Theoretical analysis and computer simulation results show that the method can provide accurate estimate of the terrain interferometric phase (interferogram) as the coregistration error reaches one pixel. The effectiveness of the method is also verified with the real data from the Spaceborne Imaging Radar-C/X Band SAR and the European Remote Sensing 1 and 2 satellites.