A phase filtering method with scale recurrent networks for InSAR

Abstract

Phase filtering is a key issue in interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) applications, such as deformation monitoring and topographic mapping. The accuracy of the deformation and terrain height is highly dependent on the quality of phase filtering. Researchers are committed to continuously improving the accuracy and efficiency of phase filtering. Inspired by the successful application of neural networks in SAR image denoising, in this paper we propose a phase filtering method that is based on deep learning to efficiently filter out the noise in the interferometric phase. In this method, the real and imaginary parts of the interferometric phase are filtered while using a scale recurrent network, which includes three single scale subnetworks based on the encoder-decoder architecture. The network can utilize the global structural phase information contained in the different-scaled feature maps, because RNN units are used to connect the three different-scaled subnetworks and transmit current state information among different subnetworks. The encoder part is used for extracting the phase features, and the decoder part restores detailed information from the encoded feature maps and makes the size of the output image the same as that of the input image. Experiments on simulated and real InSAR data prove that the proposed method is superior to three widely-used phase filtering methods by qualitative and quantitative comparisons. In addition, on the same simulated data set, the overall performance of the proposed method is better than another deep learning-based method (DeepInSAR). The runtime of the proposed method is only about 0.043s for an image with a size of 1024 × 1024 pixels, which has the significant advantage of computational efficiency in practical applications that require real-time processing.