Phase unwrapping in InSAR : A review

Abstract

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometry (InSAR) is primarily used in remote-sensing applications and has created a new class of radar data that has significantly evolved during the last couple of decades. Most of the InSAR applications (e.g., topographic mapping and deformation monitoring) typically use a technique called phase unwrapping (PU). In this article, we present an overview of PU techniques in InSAR signal processing. First, we review the established single-baseline (SB) PU methods and then describe innovative PU techniques and concepts related to multibaseline (MB) PU and large-scale (LS) PU. In addition, we discuss several numerical processing examples of these PU techniques. It is our hope that this review will provide guidelines to future researchers to enhance further PU algorithmic developments.