A new strategy for phase unwrapping in insar time series over areas with high deformation rate: Case study on the southern tehran subsidence

Abstract

The primary step in all timeseries interferometric synthetic aperture radar (T-InSAR) algorithms is the phase unwrapping step to resolve the inherent cycle ambiguities of interferometric phases. In areas with a high spatio-temporal deformation gradient, phase unwrapping fails due to the aliasing problem, and so it can result in an underestimation of deformation signal. One way to handle this problem is to use the so called Small-Baseline Subset (SBAS) algorithms; in these algorithms, by using only small-baseline interferograms-hence interferograms with small deformation gradients-the chance of unwrapping error gets reduced. However, due to more number of the used interferograms, SBAS method is computationally more expensive and more time-consuming compared to algorithms that exploit Single-Master (SM) stacks. Moreover, the existence of sufficiently small temporal baseline interferograms is not guaranteed in all SAR stacks. In this paper, we propose a new method to take advantage of short temporal baseline interferograms but effectively using SM approach. We treat the phase unwrapping step as a Bayesian estimation problem while the prior information, required by the Bayesian estimator, is extracted from few short coherent interferograms that are unwrapped separately. Results from the proposed approach and a case study over the southwest of Tehran, with a high subsidence rate (reaching to 25 cm/year), demonstrates that utilizing the proposed method overcomes the aliasing problem and produces the results equal to the conventional SBAS results, while the proposed method is computationally much more efficient than SBAS.