Filtering strong noisy synthetic aperture radar （SAR） interferogram with integrated Contoured Median and Goldstein two-step filter

Abstract

At present, most of the traditional filters such as Goldstein, Lee, Median, Mean, and Periodic filter, can not meet the demand of noise suppression for interferograms contaminated by phase noise. Repeat filtering, however, will result in serious loss of fringe pattern. In this paper, a two-step filter is presented. The filter inherits the good edge preservation characteristics of the Contoured window fi lter and the strong smoothing capability of the Goldstein filter. In addition, it introduces the pseudo- coherence of interferogram to improve the adaptiveness of the Goldstein filter. Experimental results with both simulated and real data show that the proposed filter performs quite well both in noise reduction and in detail preservation. Moreover, it can partially recover continuous interferometric fringes from area without signals, and is applicable for interferograms with very dense and heavily curved fringes.